This is volume 1 of Dust-to-Digital's robust Art of Field Recording series assembled by esteemed archivists Art and Margo Rosenbaum. This impressive 4CD set includes ballads, blues, spirituals, work songs and slave songs, religious singing, such as the African-American ring-shout and other traditional folk music from Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan and New York performed with voices and stringed instruments such as banjo and fiddle. Comes housed in a 11"x11"x1" color cardboard box containing a 96-page 10"x10" perfect-bound book with over 100 illustrations and photographs, and four CDs with a total of 110 tracks. The diverse talents of both Art and Margo Rosenbaum have allowed them to document music traditions in a way few others could have done. Art is a painter, a muralist, and an illustrator, as well as a collector and performer of traditional American folk music. Margo is a photographer that has captured many of Art's field recording encounters. Art Rosenbaum of Athens, Georgia, has been collecting and studying traditional American music for over 50 years. His focus covers Appalachian banjo tunes and ballads, Southern and Midwestern fiddle tunes, blues and spirituals. Rosenbaum began seeking out traditional performers while in his teens, rediscovering and recording the great blues guitarist Scrapper Blackwell and fiddler John W. Summers, both in his then-home state of Indiana. His fieldwork has produced archival material in the Indiana University Folklore Archives, the University of Georgia Libraries and the Archives of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.
Vol.II
AOFR-Art Of Field Recording @ALAC Vol.2 CD1-4
REVIEW
Like the first volume of Art of Field Recording, this second installment is a four-CD box set of considerable size and scope of field recordings by Art Rosenbaum. The 107 tracks, recorded between 1956 and 2008 (the very year this set was issued), cover an enormous range of American traditional music. Cajun, Appalachian folk, country blues, gospel, Sacred Harp singing, sacred steel guitar, and a cappella vocals are among the styles documented. It might not quite get to everything, but it certainly captures plenty of approaches that had little to no exposure in the conventional commercial music business over this half century, yet were preserved and performed outside of the media spotlight. Like its predecessor, it's also divided into four separate thematic discs, though these are slightly different this time around. The first and second CDs are (as they were in Vol. 1) devoted to a "survey" disc encompassing a bunch of styles and a disc of religious material; the third and fourth go into different directions by presenting a CD of "accompanied songs and ballads," and another wholly of "unaccompanied songs and ballads," or songs performed a cappella. A few performers here and there will be known to folk fans (Cajun musicians the Balfa Brothers and Nathan Abshire, bluesman Scrapper Blackwell, Alice Gerrard, Buell Kazee), but mostly these are musicians without commercial profiles who make music because they want to, happening to get these performances taped by Rosenbaum.
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