Summer Voices - Dust-to-Digital

Guest editors and co-founders of Dust-to-Digital Lance and April Ledbetter share their love of Southern music with the world.

By Lance and April Ledbetter

t was exciting for April and me to be invited to be guest editors of The Bitter Southerner. The BS team has been supportive of Dust-to-Digital’s work since the magazine’s early days, and it is an honor to be able to contribute to their ongoing coverage of the South.

The American South is a very important place to me. I was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and I’ve been a resident of Georgia all of my life, having been raised in LaFayette, then living in Young Harris, Athens, Decatur, and Atlanta, where I’ve resided the past 25 years. It was during my time at college in Atlanta that I began to conceptualize what was to become Dust-to-Digital. I had had a vision of running my own record label at age 14, and although I was a fan of a wide variety of music, I had no idea what I wanted my label to produce. During my time as a DJ at WRAS at Georgia State University, I began to think about how much incredible music from the past had become hidden and was nearly impossible to access. I began to visualize how a label could compile past recordings, add research and images, and create access points for transporting listeners through various productions.

During my time at GSU, I met and began dating April Gambill, a film student at the university. I told her about how I had been ordering cassette tapes of rare recordings from a record collector in Maryland for my radio show, and that I felt like more people should know about this music. When I mentioned that I wanted to figure out the process for reissuing these recordings, she expressed an interest in helping with the research and offered to contribute however she could.

For the first project, “Goodbye, Babylon,” I approached a genre with which I had been familiar since I was young — gospel music performed in the South. After spending close to a year going through cassette tape after cassette tape of dubs from several record collectors with whom I had connected, I compiled the final list of 160 tracks. In my view, these recordings represented the best examples of the many subgenres of gospel music that I could identify recorded between 1902 and 1960. I believed they possessed the power to impact listeners in a very deep way and would showcase a genre that many record collectors pay little attention to. The reaction to the release was overwhelmingly positive, and the box set was nominated for several Grammy Awards. The apex of the response, to me, was when I heard Neil Young mention on NPR that Bob Dylan had given him a copy. That still kind of blows my mind to think about.

It’s hard for me to believe, but it has been nearly 20 years since our first project. Although our company has produced more than 50 titles since, today most people who have heard of Dust-to-Digital are likely to recognize the name by its presence on social media. This is largely due to a shift we made in 2016, when we began to increase our publishing to Facebook. Over the years we have added other platforms like Twitter and YouTube, but in my view, Instagram is where we have had the largest impact.

In 2017, I was thinking a lot about taking the approach I had developed on Facebook and imagined producing daily posts on Instagram. The platform was gaining popularity and had recently increased its video time limit to 1 minute, which I felt was long enough for us to bring to that audience compelling music that I felt was underrepresented. On May 1, 2017, April and I attended the Col. Bruce Hampton 70th birthday celebration concert at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta. Bruce was a friend of mine, and I was honored to have a standing invitation to his Wednesday lunches at various Chinese restaurants on Buford Highway. That night, Bruce departed this mortal plane after collapsing on the stage at the Fox Theatre. I knew that would be a way he would want to go, so in some ways I was happy for him, but I also was sad that I would never see him again. On May 3, two days after the concert, I posted the last photo I took of Bruce at the show. Little did I know that that post would begin a run of 1,552 straight days of Instagram posts on the Dust-to-Digital account. And although the account remains very active today, the consecutive streak ended on August 2, 2021.

Just like Dust-to-Digital’s inaugural audio production, our first social media posts also focused on music from the South. The South is the origin of Dust-to-Digital and our foundation. April and I have been fortunate to work with some of the greatest folklorists, musicians, and musicologists in the region. As we continue to live here and witness the molding and shaping of the South’s constant evolution, we remain excited to be a part of its story.

— Lance Ledbetter

This editor-takeover project has been a gift of an opportunity to share what is happening in what I think of as the world of Dust-to-Digital beyond the scope of a record label release or social media post. 

Over the years working for Dust-to-Digital, I’ve met some exceptionally interesting and talented people. I’m thrilled to share the work of those people with you in this special edition of The Bitter Southerner.

I hope you enjoy seeing the South through the eyes of photographers George Mitchell, Margo Newmark Rosenbaum, and Adam Smith and learning about the important, ongoing work done by folklorists of the region as described by Sarah Bryan and Emily Hilliard.

— April Ledbetter

Table of Contents

Folklorists Sarah Bryan and Emily Hilliard talk with guest editors Lance and April Ledbetter about tradition, authenticity, and building creative cultural communities in our digital age.

Photographs by Margo Newmark Rosenbaum

Photographs by George Mitchell

Header photo by Fernando Decillis