Thousands of rare American recordings — some 100 years old — go online for all to enjoy

Thousands of rare American songs spanning jazz, blues and gospel — some more than a century old — are now available for the public to enjoy online.

That’s thanks to a collaboration between UC Santa Barbara and the nonprofit Dust-to-Digital Foundation, which digitized the recordings from rare and aging vinyl collections.

It’s work Dust-to-Digital founder Lance Ledbetter has done since the late 1990s, going into private collections so the recordings can be accessible to all.

The inspiration

Ledbetter remembered the first time he got to visit the 30,000-strong record collection of the late Joe Bussard in his Frederick, Maryland, basement.

“It was just one great recording after another. And he was getting excited and we were getting excited. And it was fantastic,” Ledbetter recalled.

Bussard was kind of like the original crate digger, sometimes even going door-to-door to build his stockpile. His collection included rarities like “The California Desert Blues,” recorded by Lane Hardin in the 1930s.

Ledbetter said only a handful of the records are known to exist.

“A lot of that music from that era, the record companies did not keep backups. They were all destroyed, almost all. And it’s all up to the record collectors. They’re the ones who kind of saved the music from that era,” Ledbetter told LAist.

April and Lance Ledbetter, Dust-to-Digital Foundation.

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Lizzy Johnston

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How it works

The collaboration between Ledbetter and UC Santa Barbara’s library will bring some 50,000 songs — including many from Bussard’s collection — to the library’s Discography of American Historical Recordings (DAHR) database for all to enjoy. About 5,000 songs are available now.

Search the archive

Superior to a random recording uploaded to YouTube with no accompanying information, the database includes things like where the song was recorded and when, as well as lists of musicians and composers who worked on the songs.

“These recordings, especially like the Lane Hardin, where there’s two or three known copies — like a Van Gogh painting or something — [they] could disappear into a private collection for the next 50 or 60 years and nobody would be able to hear that copy again,” said David Suebert, curator of the Performing Arts Collection at the UCSB Library.

You might assume that the Library of Congress or other archives would already have some of these historic tunes, Suebert said. But they don’t have everything. And bringing these hard-to-find songs spanning decades of historic American music to the public is a source of pride for Suebert.

“This is the kind of stuff that makes any librarian or archivist kind of glow. The fact that you’ve enriched people’s lives by giving them free information,” he said.

For his part, Ledbetter said he hopes everyone from musicians to scholars really get to use and appreciate the archive. And maybe even feel a bit of the excitement he felt listening to record after record and talking with collector Joe Bussard in his basement.

“You don’t smell the cigar smoke, you don’t see the needle going onto the record, but you get to hear the exact same record,” Ledbetter said. “People should always be able to hear these songs.”