New print Available to supporters of the Dust-to-Digital Foundation
“why Music?” by r. Daniel Mooney
To date, the Dust-to-Digital Foundation has digitized more than 50,000 rare and historic audio recordings, safeguarding the legacies of musicians from around the world. These recordings represent not only the artistry of the past, but the cultural narratives that shaped the music we listen to today.
Our preservation initiatives, combined with our ongoing social media outreach, are helping to educate listeners about the roots of music while shining a light on the evolution of musical traditions.
Every contribution — whether large or small — plays a critical role in ensuring that these invaluable recordings remain available for generations to come. Your support is a key part of this work, and we are deeply grateful for it. Together, we are keeping the music — and the stories it carries — alive.
To show our appreciation, we have created a print using the powerful text written by music teacher R. Daniel Mooney. We will be sending prints to individuals who donate $100 or more through December 2024.
Print Dimensions: 18 inches by 24 inches
Will Ship: January 2025.
MAKE A DONATION TODAY
We are continuing the work started by the collectors and researchers in the 1950s and ’60s. We share their passion to keep the history of our musical heritage from being forgotten and are committed to preventing that from happening.
Our goal is to build a database complete with audio, discographical information, artist and composer biographies, song lyrics and notation. Our hope for this database is that it will serve as a musical Rosetta Stone for future generations by showing the links and cross-influences of the many musical styles captured on phonograph records in the first half of the 20th century. While the database is being constructed, we have been able to supply digital recordings to discographers, writers, and publishers such as Bear Family, Dust-to-Digital, Omnivore, Oxford American, and the Smithsonian.
If you would like to find out how you could be of assistance to our mission, please send us a message.
The Dust-to-Digital Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of recorded music of all types & genres. Our tax id is 27-3076188.
The MISSION of the dust-t0-digital foundation IS TO PRESERVE AUDIO RECORDINGS FOR the education of PRESENT AND FUTURE GENERATIONS.
The Collectors
Joe Bussard pictured above.
Over the years, most 78 RPM records were worn out, broken, thrown away, made into ashtrays, used as target practice for local carnival ball-throwing contests, plowed into landfills, or donated to scrap shellac drives during World War II. Today, not one household in a hundred even has an old-fashioned Victrola that can even play the discs.
Yet a handful of collectors and scholars sensed the importance of this culture, and sought to act before it was too late; they began collecting the old 78s, cleaning them, figuring out the best way to get the best sound from them, trading them with other collectors, learning what they could about the names on the labels. On a 78, the listener received no liner notes on recording information as he or she does today: you got a name (which might well be a pseudonym) and a song title (which might not be the one the artist gave to them). To establish a social and musical context for these records, you had to do painstaking research — not only in old company files, but actually beating the bushes in towns from which the musicians came.
“bit by bit, byte by byte, Dust-to-Digital will continue to expose modern audiences to forgotten gems from the analogue era.”
~ The Economist
The Music
In many ways, the era from 1925 to 1950 represents the Golden Age of roots music. It was during these years that the rich, vibrant tradition of folk music made its way onto the new mass media of radio and records. This was the age when far-sighted collectors and ambitious commercial record companies began preserving parts of this vast, complicated heritage, and helped spread it around the world, where it stimulated many of the great genres of pop: jazz, blues, gospel, western swing, rockabilly, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll.
These fragile 78 RPM records, produced in an age before tape, before mixing, before multiple microphones, often in makeshift studios, carried the message of this powerful music into coal camps, railroad yards, juke joints, small town barber shops, the porches of thousands of farm houses and company towns — wherever people could grab a few moments of rest from their work and relax to the sounds of a music that was uniquely theirs.
MAKE A TAX-DEDUCTIBLE DONATION TODAY TO HELP SUPPORT OUR WORK.
In July 2011, the Dust-to-Digital Foundation was granted tax-exempt status by the Internal Revenue Service under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Contributions to the Dust-to-Digital Foundation are deductible under section 170 of the Code. Our EIN is 27-3076188.
