The Backbeat

Musicologist Steve Bauer discusses the history of the backbeat: Click HERE (original link removed because of autoplay).

Syrian Pianist Performs in Washington, Syrian Police Beat His Parents in Syria

CNN
Syrian musician blames security forces for his parents' beating
By Tom Watkins, CNN
July 30, 2011 7:53 a.m. EDT

(CNN) -- Malek Jandali, a pianist who performed last week at a rally in Washington in support of the Syrian opposition, blamed his work for what he said was an attack Thursday night by government security forces on his parents.

The father, Dr. Mamoun Jandali, 73, was carrying groceries from his car to his home in Homs when a man grabbed him from behind and asked him to help care for someone who had been injured, Jandali told CNN Friday in a telephone interview from Orlando, Florida.

When the doctor agreed to do so, the man spoke into his cell phone and said to bring the patient. Moments later, two other men showed up unaccompanied by any patient. They handcuffed the doctor, covered his mouth and nose with duct tape, then took him upstairs, Jandali said. The musician's 66-year-old mother, Linah, was in bed.

"All of a sudden, she finds two men attacking her while the guy was holding my dad and ordering the other two to beat my mom in the head and eyes," Jandali said. "My dad, he couldn't do anything other than watch this atrocity."

The three men broke his mother's teeth and beat his father, then locked them both in their bathroom and ransacked the house, their son said. After the attackers had departed, the father, who had held on to his cell phone throughout the ordeal, called relatives. He had to call security forces to remove his handcuffs.

The doctor then sewed shut a cut in his wife's face, said Jandali.

Jandali said his performance in Washington had provoked the attack. During his mother's beating, "they were telling her that ... 'we're going to teach you how to raise your son.'"
Read the full story HERE.

Bob Dylan's The times They Are a-Changin' on his 70th Birthday

Dylan composed and recorded this in 1963 when he was twenty-two years old. Some of his commentary on the song makes sound as if he was working on intuition, not really getting what it was about to some degree. It's simple musically, though I dig the rhyme scheme. But man, for all its stark simplicity Dylan instinctively nailed the sea change that was in the air and coming.



Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's naming.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.

NYT: Music on Virginia's Crooked Road

NYT
May 20, 2011
On Virginia’s Crooked Road, Mountain Music Lights the Way
By SARAH WILDMAN

IT starts with a well-worn fiddle, held in equally well-worn hands above a tapping black cowboy boot. Then in comes the banjo, plucked with steel finger picks, followed by the autoharp, the mandolin, the percussive beat of an upright bass. Another banjo grabs the melody, and suddenly the room is bursting with knee-slapping, country-porch music. A man in a crisp checked shirt gets up and starts to dance, bouncing out a complicated bumbumBAM bumbumBAM with his feet, moving as smoothly as a Martha Graham dancer, hitting the floor on the downbeat.

It is Thursday night in Fries (pronounced freeze), Va., population 600, on the wide New River. In the century-old Fries Theater, the silk wallpaper, once a glorious aquamarine embossed with gold ferns, is faded. A sign promises movies for 10 cents, 25 cents on weekends, but there hasn’t been a film here in years. The Fries high school closed in 1989 after the cotton mill that gave birth to this hamlet in 1902 shut down. But where the economy has faltered, the local music culture is thriving. Take a drive through the dozens of one-stoplight towns that are planted along highways that twist through this region’s blue hills and green valleys, and you’ll find that music is the manna of the community.

Fries was my first stop on the music trail known as the Crooked Road — an official designation of the state of Virginia since 2004. The heritage of the path can be found in this dance, in that tune, learned by ear from house to house and passed down through generations. The Road isn’t one single highway — it’s a roughly 300-mile series of interconnected two-lane byways and long stretches of Route 58, which skims Virginia’s North Carolina and Tennessee borders all the way to Kentucky. The sound here is Appalachian: mountain music. Joe Wilson, who wrote a book on the Crooked Road, calls the area the “pickle barrel” of American music. “You know you can’t make a good pickle by squirting vinegar on a cucumber,” he said. “You have to let it sit.”

Over five days in April, I rambled along part of the Crooked Road and towns around it, from Fries up to Ferrum and Floyd, back to Galax and out to Marion, dipping down toward Abington, and back to Galax again.

...........

If there ever was a place where musical authenticity was born and nurtured, “raised up” as the people around here say, the Crooked Road is it. From the Carter Family Fold in Hiltons (the site of Johnny Cash’s last concert) and Clintwood, deep in coal country, to the farms near Floyd, music is still being made on fiddles and banjos, mandolins and guitars, dulcimers and autoharps. Every night you’ll find pick-up jams on front porches, performances in theaters and quartets that pack storefronts, an old courthouse and even a Dairy Queen. In summer the area is awash in festivals, from Dr. Ralph Stanley’s Memorial Day bluegrass festival in the mountains of Coeburn, Va., to the venerable Old Fiddlers Convention held every August in Galax.

This region is where old-time and bluegrass was born. Old-time is dance music, simpler and older than bluegrass. Bluegrass is filled with vocal harmonies, many made famous by (relative) newbies like Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch. It is suited more for seated audiences than the foot-stomping dance I saw in Fries, which is known as flatfoot. Both genres evolved from tunes brought by Scotch-Irish and German settlers who traveled down the wagon trails from Pennsylvania. They brought dulcimers and fiddles and later picked up the banjo from former slaves.
..........
Read the entire story plus multimeadia HERE.

Remembering Actor J.C. Quinn, Plus a Scene from Vision Quest

For some reason I thought of this guy today, actor J.C. Quinn. In the 1990s he used to come listen to my Latin jazz sextet, an ideal audience member nursing a drink and really listening through the surrounding din. He introduced himself as "J.C., you know, like John Coltrane." He always wanted to talk music on breaks while I wanted to ask him about cinema. He had great stories, and thinking back I don't know why I didn't ask him twice as many questions; I was on the job and too damn busy, I suppose. He fell into acting late but went on to study at Strasberg's Actor's Studio. He possessed a face and voice oozing with character. This scene from Vision Quest (1985) with Matthew Modine isn't particularly well written, but the dude is totally committed and just owns it; he makes it art. I miss ya, J.C.

Tom Paxton Humbly Garners Lifetime Grammy for Folk Music

WaPo
Power Of Just Plain Folk
Tom Paxton Humbly Garners Life Grammy

By J. Freedom du Lac
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 7, 2009; C01

Tom Paxton, an icon of the 1960s folk music movement, is riffing in a coffeehouse. Perfect!

Of course, it's a Starbucks near Paxton's townhouse in Old Town Alexandria -- nothing like the small, homey cafe in New York's Greenwich Village where he landed his first singing job nearly 50 years ago after crash-landing in the creative center of the American folk scene.

"It was happening right as I got there," Paxton says of the folk revival that was underway when he moved to the Village from New Jersey's Fort Dix, where he'd been posted with the Army. "On weekends, you couldn't move on the sidewalk, and all the coffeehouses would be crammed. It was the tail end of the Beat generation, and the Gaslight actually featured some of the Beat poets; the folk singers were kind of interspersed between them. But that didn't last long. Pretty soon, it was folk singers, period. It was exciting to be part of that."

Paxton never really moved on: The "small-town yokel from Oklahoma" who as a kid favored Woody Guthrie and the Weavers over the pop stars of the day has been almost singularly focused on folk music for the entirety of his adult life. For his efforts -- for five decades of writing, recording, performing, straw-stirring, self-editing, influencing, hamming, mentoring, teaching and rewriting -- Paxton, 71, will receive a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award today in Los Angeles as part of the Recording Academy's Grammy Week festivities.

The award, which honors artistic contributions to the field of recording, will be announced on tomorrow night's live Grammy telecast and will place Paxton in pretty fine company. Previous Lifetime Achievement Award recipients include some of the most famous of all folkies: Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and the Weavers, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan.

"One of the things with Tom Paxton is that while he might not be as much of a household name as some of the people we've honored, his music has been really influential," says Bill Freimuth, vice president of awards for the Recording Academy, which gives out the Grammys. "He's very much considered a mentor to many, many musicians; he's been an inspiration to so many other folks who've continued the tradition of making great music.

". . . And Tom always stuck to his heart, sometimes perhaps at the cost of his wallet. He did not go the commercial route. People really respect that about Tom."

Paxton's take? "The English have a word for it: gob-smacked. It's recognition I never thought I'd get. You think of the Grammys as billion-selling artists. I've never had a hit record myself; other people have had hits with some of my songs, but I haven't. Not even close. I'm stunned."

For the uninitiated (basically, anybody who doesn't have a subscription to Sing Out! magazine), Paxton's catalogue is filled with both satirical songs and serious songs, almost all of which have choruses constructed for sing-alongs. They're songs about adult relationships, children's songs and pointedly topical songs. Lots and lots of those, including "Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation," "The Ballad of Spiro Agnew" and "I Don't Want a Bunny Wunny," about Jimmy Carter and the "killer" swamp rabbit that the president said attacked his fishing boat in 1979. (That one still gets requested in concert, though Paxton is down to about 40 dates per year. Loves the interchange; hates the travel.)

There was also "I'm Changing My Name to Chrysler," about the controversial 1979 federal bailout, and the recent update/sequel, "I'm Changing My Name to Fannie Mae." Also: "The Bravest," a poignant song about the heroic efforts of the 9/11 firefighters, and "Sarah Palin," a silly song about, well . . . you know.

Over the past half-century, other artists have recorded plenty of Paxton's songs -- none more frequently than the regretful lover's farewell, "The Last Thing on My Mind," which has been recorded by something like 200 artists, from Baez and Judy Collins to Neil Diamond and Charley Pride. It's been performed so many times, by so many artists around the world, that some people apparently think it's a traditional folk song of unknown origin, as Paxton's youngest daughter, Kate, discovered at a pub in Scotland.

"True story," he says. "A musician at the pub sang 'The Last Thing on My Mind,' and during the break, Kate went over to him and said, 'Thank you for singing that song; my dad wrote it.' He said: 'No, he didn't. . . . He couldn't possibly have written it. That's an old Scottish folk song that I learned from my dad.'

"And she said: 'I'm telling you, it was my dad!' 'Who's your dad?' 'Tom Paxton.' He thought for the longest time and then said, 'Well, he might have written it.' "

He laughs. "I've decided to settle for that: I might have written it."

Paxton still sits down to write several times each week at home in Alexandria, where there's a framed manuscript of "This Land Is Your Land" -- in Woody Guthrie's own handwriting! -- on a living-room table. (It was an anniversary gift from Midge, Paxton's wife of 45 years. They moved here in 1996, from East Hampton, to be closer to their brood: Kate lives a few doors away in Old Town, oldest daughter Jennifer is in Bethesda with her husband and three children.)

So how many Tom Paxton songs might there be?

"It's a meaningless statistic," he protests. "I could say a couple thousand. But it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is how many songs you'll admit to having written. That could be 500."

The first one worth owning up to was "The Marvelous Toy," a whimsical, oft-covered children's song written during his stint as Pfc. Paxton. "I wrote it on an Army typewriter," he says. "I was in the clerk typist school at Fort Dix, New Jersey. But I was bored out of my mind because I could already type!"

Paxton became a folk artist because, he says, "I couldn't not."

Explain, please.

"I was always a sensitive child and young man, and I was very passionate about the things I was passionate about. One of those things was music in general and folk music in particular. There was something about folk music that spoke to me very personally, even when the songs were nothing about a life I knew. They seemed to be a window into a broader soul. They made me feel connected somehow."

He'd been born in Chicago and raised mostly in Bristow, Okla., and enrolled in the drama program at the University of Oklahoma because he'd always been in school plays and always loved to perform. But he became increasingly interested in folk music, eventually forming a group with two like-minded classmates. "We had our own little imitation Kingston Trio/Weavers trio, singing in a coffeehouse off-campus for no money," he recalls.

Listening to "The Weavers at Carnegie Hall" changed his life. "By the last track, I had undergone a chromosomal change. I had gone from somebody who loved this music to somebody who had to try to do it."

When he came to New York, courtesy of the Army, he'd found his spiritual home. "I began making friends right away: Dave Van Ronk, Noel Stookey from Peter, Paul and Mary. I stayed in the Village and slept on a lot of sofas and somehow began to make my way."

Pete Seeger took Paxton under his wing and sang "Ramblin' Boy," the young, still-unsigned artist's elegy to a lost friend, at a Weavers reunion concert at Carnegie Hall in 1963. Nice introduction. (It became the title track of Paxton's 1964 debut recording for Elektra and remains one of Paxton's best-known songs.)

More stories?

The owner of the soon-to-be-legendary Gaslight Cafe, where Paxton often performed, was convinced that the singer-songwriter with the Army haircut was an undercover cop. "But nobody really thought of me as an Army guy; I was one of them."

Paxton ran with Van Ronk and Stookey and Phil Ochs, and he talked shop with Dylan. "One night, in the Kettle of Fish, which was the bar above the Gaslight, a bunch of us were sitting around a table, as we usually did between shows. Bob was sitting next to me and said, 'Listen to this.' And I leaned over, and into my ear alone, he sang a new song called 'Gates of Eden.' I said: 'Bob, I really like that song. I really like that song.' He was really exploding creatively then."

Did the positive feedback flow both ways? "Oh, yeah," Paxton says. "We had a drink one night . . . and Bob told me that he loved my song 'Annie's Gonna Sing Her Song' and that he'd actually recorded it, though he didn't know if it was going to come out. He told me several times over the years how much he liked that song."

Funny thing about the scene, Paxton says: "We were all competitive and supportive at the same time, and there was no apparent dichotomy. We were supportive, but of course you wanted to do better."

Some did better than others, of course. Dylan took off like a rocket before plugging in to play rock-and-roll. Others became marquee stars, too: Baez, Richie Havens, Peter, Paul and Mary. That gave everybody hope. "Looking back, the thing that one is apt to forget is the insecurity of it," he says. "Nobody knew if they were going to be able to actually sustain a living doing this. "

Paxton, though, couldn't land a record deal during his first four years in the Village. "And it wasn't like now, where you can put out your own record; you had to wait until you got a contract," he says. He wondered if he'd ever make it.

But he had steady employment, performing at the Gaslight and elsewhere. And the songwriting was really working for Paxton, who had received his first big break in fall 1960. He'd auditioned for the Chad Mitchell Trio and was picked provisionally as the group's newest member, but it turned out that the voices didn't blend quite right. But he'd sung "The Marvelous Toy" for the group, which ultimately had its one hit with the song. More important, Milt Okun, the founder of Cherry Lane Music and the Chad Mitchell Trio's producer, wanted to publish Paxton's work. "That was the only good song I had at that point; I thought I had more, but I didn't," Paxton says. "But it was enough to let Milt know that I was already a songwriter. . . . And we're still together, damn near 50 years later."

At the time, Okun was producing for multiple artists, including Peter, Paul and Mary, and he wound up getting several of them to record Paxton's songs, such as "I Can't Help but Wonder Where I'm Bound." As a result, Paxton had a modest, steady income even before he was signed to Elektra in 1964. "And it was tremendously supportive morally," he says. "I knew that I was not kidding myself if other people liked the songs well enough to do them.

"It was exciting to think that, my God, I can actually do this."

Still can. Still is.

"I wouldn't be able to define success in folk music; it's almost an oxymoron," Paxton says. "It really doesn't fit. But I suppose one measure of success is that I'm still doing it nearly 50 years later."

Music for Many Firsts at Inauguration Events

NYT
January 22, 2009
Music Review
Music for Many Firsts at Inauguration Events
By JON PARELES

President Obama danced his way through 10 official inaugural balls on Tuesday night to the song “At Last,” which was a hit for Glenn Miller in 1941 and, more influentially, in 1961 for Etta James. Her version made the song, written by Mack Gordon and Harry Warren, an R&B standard and a wedding perennial. It has been revived and recorded steadily ever since by performers including, most recently, Beyoncé, who sang it for Mr. Obama’s first public dance as president at the Neighborhood Ball, broadcast on ABC.

A good campaigner wields symbols deftly, and Mr. Obama chose brilliantly with “At Last.” It’s an adoring, slow-dance love song with a title that can evoke far more. Politicos can take it to mean the end of the Bush administration and the Democrats taking control. And Americans of all ethnicities can take it as a clear reference to Mr. Obama becoming the first African-American president: a decisive turning point in a history of slavery and racial discrimination. The song treats the moment not with self-righteousness or resentment, but as a long-awaited embrace: “Here we are in heaven/for you are mine at last.”

Music had long anticipated this moment. African-Americans repaid the historical injustice of slavery with generous and profound cultural gifts, making American music a free-for-all where fertile, powerful ideas — like swing, call-and-response, the modes and phrasing of the blues, the drive and dynamics of gospel and the immediacy of hip-hop — could triumph in the marketplace and on the dance floor.

For performers of every background, American popular music (and much of the world’s popular music) is, unmistakably, African-American music. Americans have long accepted black musicians as stars; sooner or later, politics had to follow. And Mr. Obama’s inaugural events, which strove to involve everyone, were suffused with African-American soul like the rest of American pop culture. Aretha Franklin, wearing an outsized, glamorized church-lady hat, sang “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” at the swearing-in ceremony with the flamboyance of a gospel hymn: “Let freedom ring, let it ring!”

The evening before, at a concert to mark Martin Luther King’s Birthday, Ms. Franklin treated her free concert at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts like a gospel service, including only one secular song (“Chain of Fools”) and hurling her voice skyward while promising to praise Jesus everywhere. “I’ll stand up and tell it in the White House!” she declared.

The language of gospel, blended with secular American optimism, emerged in Mr. Obama’s campaign slogans, like “Change you can believe in.” Now, savoring the outcome of that campaign while considering the state of the nation, the inaugural music drew on another cornerstone of African-American tradition: the determination to face troubles and hard times with hope. The inauguration’s official face was bookended with those two aspects of the music, moving in two days from a somber introduction to a joyful finale.

The earnest opening ceremony televised on Sunday from the Lincoln Memorial, which HBO telecast free for cable and satellite viewers, was more than aware of the symbolism of Lincoln as emancipator and of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 March on Washington.

The chords and choirs of gospel music were used by Bruce Springsteen (with “The Rising”) and even the country singer Garth Brooks to sing about striving for better times. Stevie Wonder (with Usher and Shakira) sang his socially conscious “Higher Ground” at the Lincoln Memorial, then returned at the determinedly upbeat Neighborhood Ball, with an all-star singalong on his “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours.”

Song titles told the story at the Neighborhood Ball: Sting (with Mr. Wonder on harmonica) with “Brand New Day,” Shakira singing Van Morrison’s “Bright Side of the Road,” Mariah Carey with “Hero.”

Bill Clinton’s 1993 pre-inaugural concert showed his baby-boomer taste, for good and bad. Bob Dylan performed “Chimes of Freedom” on the Lincoln Memorial steps, followed two days later by an Inauguration Eve concert filled with presumably reassuring 1970s soft rock from Fleetwood Mac and Barry Manilow. Political differences offered George W. Bush less of a talent pool; Wayne Newton, the country duo Brooks & Dunn and the Latin pop singer Ricky Martin (who would later turn against Mr. Bush over the Iraq war) performed at his pre-inaugural event.

Stars who had shunned the politics of the Bush administration happily flocked to Washington for Mr. Obama’s inauguration. “Today is the beginning of no more separation, no more segregation!” Mary J. Blige exulted at the Neighborhood Ball before singing her own “Just Fine,” a song about hard-won self-esteem. (Two days earlier, at the Lincoln Memorial, she had poured emotion into Bill Withers’s comforting song “Lean On Me.”)

While it was a gospel and soul inauguration, it was also a hip-hop inauguration. Rappers who are charismatic, articulate, self-made successes may well see Mr. Obama as one of their own; he also gives them someone to boast about besides themselves.

Jay-Z, who performed his “History” at the Neighborhood Ball, also headlined a premium-priced concert on Monday night at the Warner Theater, a few blocks from the White House. Among his guests was Young Jeezy, who has a song called “My President Is Black”; Jay-Z added verses of his own: “My president is black/In fact he’s half white/So even in the racist mind/he’s half right.”

It continued, “My president is black/but his house is all white.”

The Youth Ball, an official inaugural event telecast on MTV, featured Kanye West — a Chicagoan, like Mr. Obama — who rewrote his song “Heartless” to pay tribute to the new president: “From miles around they came to see him speak/The story that he told/to save a country that’s so blue/that they thought had lost its soul/the American dream come true tonight.”

Other constituencies presented unofficial events, celebrating their new sense of inclusion and, perhaps, reminding the incoming administration of their clout and attention. There were musical celebrations from Chicago independent rockers, from the voter-registration group Rock the Vote and from the gay, lesbian and transgender voters of the Human Rights Campaign. At a Latino Inaugural Gala on Sunday night, more than a dozen legislators and two cabinet nominees turned out along with salsa, pop, mariachi and Latin rock bands to celebrate a Hispanic turnout that voted 2 to 1 for Mr. Obama, which provided the margin of victory in Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico.

In pop as in politics, self-promotion is never off the agenda. Michelle, Sasha and Malia Obama were dancing in the front row at the Kids’ Inaugural on Monday, telecast on the Disney Channel, where Disney-nurtured stars of tween-pop including the Jonas Brothers and Demi Lovato sang their peppy hits about “burning up” and breaking up. With sublime shamelessness, Miley Cyrus looked at Mr. Obama’s daughters and said, “Girls, I know you guys must be awful proud of your dad, and so am I,” then brought her father, Billy Ray Cyrus, onstage to sing.

While the new president’s politics and identity were the overwhelming draws for so many musical celebrants — bringing out countless performances electrified by the moment — he also has a musical ace in the hole: his name.

The percussive “Barack” followed by the three open-voweled syllables of “Obama” give him the most singable name in presidential history, and from the National Mall to the inaugural balls, amateurs and stars alike kept finding new ways to chant, sing and shout it.

Long-forgotten old-time music finds new audience (Roots music reissues)

Read the original (w/photos) at the CSM HERE
Long-forgotten old-time music finds new audience
Roots music from the early 20th century is experiencing a mini-revival with a series of new CD releases.
By Mark Guarino | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

from the January 2, 2009 edition

Entertainment galas like next month's Grammy Awards are festooned with fresh faces, trim bodies, and the latest couture. Yet in a second ceremony, when the television cameras are off and the shrieking masses have yet to gather, The Recording Academy acknowledges the less glamorous side of the music industry, which includes awarding artists who not only did their best work before Justin Timberlake was born, they also happen to be dead.

The Grammy category for Best Historical Album was launched in 1978 to little fanfare and designed mostly for compilers of big band or opera recordings. But in recent years, as record companies mine their vaults more aggressively to repackage early recorded music in box sets, and patch together snatches of lost tape to create wholly new albums, the category has grown to represent not just the legacy of a certain era or artist, but also an important new revenue channel.

This year, the category is split among a group of independent labels that are innovating how we listen to and appreciate early-century music, some of it predating electrical recording and performed by entertainers whose names are largely forgotten. Instead of shoving the music into the marketplace and waiting for it to sell, these small operators have lovingly filtered it through an interpretive lens to discover thematic connections between where we came from and who we are today.

As a result, boxed compilations are not just bringing forgotten voices back to life, they are making them suddenly relevant. Here, African-American comedian Bert Williams and popular singer Billy Murray can finally be recognized as the greatest recording stars of the Edison cylinder era.

With technology allowing access to centuries of culture through the click of the mouse, having someone curate the past is becoming more essential.

"One thing we strive for are the historical liner notes and photographs and trying to recreate the time period you just don't get with an MP3," says Lance Ledbetter, founder of Dust-To-Digital, an Atlanta independent whose biggest seller is "Goodnight Babylon," a six-CD collection of early Southern sacred songs and sermons, packaged with a 200-page book in a cedar box with pieces of cotton nestled inside. The box has sold 7,500 to date, a smash hit for a label with little overhead, no staff, and marketing the old-fashioned way: word of mouth and print reviews.

That kind of traditional business model works especially well, Josh Rosenthal says, when targeting the two audiences major labels tend to ignore: well-educated and culturally curious baby boomers and 20-somethings who ignore mainstream media channels and listen to college radio. Collectively they are the two groups that helped make "People Take Warning!" a hit for Tompkins Square, the New York City label Mr. Rosenthal has singly operated for three years.

Endorsed by Tom Waits, who contributes an essay, the three-CD set assembles hillbilly songs, blues, country, and general esotery between 1913 and 1938 into three categories: "Man V Machine," "Man V Nature" and "Man V Man." Followed in that order, the songs unfold like a news ticker detailing the hardships of the first half of the last century, when disease, shipwrecks, and floods shaped the nation's character in the industrial age, and created its folk heroes, like Casey Jones, Stack O'Lee, and Tom Dooley.

Some songs double as historic documents, written in the immediate wake of the event they describe. This includes "Fate of Will Rogers and Wiley Post," sung by West Virginian singer Bill Cox two weeks after the 1935 plane crash that killed the American humorist and his pilot. Seventy-eight years later, the tremors in Cox's voice remain harrowing.

"All these forgotten stories" in the box makes it "a tribute to these lost people," Rosenthal says.

The renewed interest in early recordings is connected to two landmark reissues of the 1990s: the "Anthology of American Folk Music" in 1997 and the box of complete works by the blues singer Robert Johnson, the latter which Rosenthal helped produce in 1990 in his former life as a vice president of marketing and sales at Sony Music.

Both releases benefited by arriving alongside the Internet explosion. As adventuresome music fans unplugged from the mainstream to hunt online, music that was long marginalized began to be heard by greater numbers.

Having a digital benefactor for such primitively recorded music is an irony not lost on Richard Martin, cofounder with his wife, Meagan Hennessey, of Archeophone Records, in Champaign, Ill.

Mr. Martin says the recordings on his label, which specializes in minstrelsy, early jazz, ragtime, and vaudeville singers from before the advent of electrical recording, can often be unsettling for listeners used to the sleek production standards of today. Before microphones and consoles to manipulate signal frequencies for intimacy and depth, singers were relegated to shouting into conical horns that etched physical imprints onto discs, a primitive process resulting in recordings that today can sound murky and distant.

"You don't have lows or highs, it sounds like a telephone receiver. When you're used to that, like we are, there's a certain beauty. I like the sound of a good, clean record from 1912," he says.

Younger musicians who are inspired by early century music are likewise not bothered by the primitive sound. For them, including Andrew Bird, the acclaimed fiddler-songwriter, the purity is in the performance.

"It's good to remind yourself now and then what it is to be truly naturally musical," says Mr. Bird. "A lot of that stuff is social music, it served a purpose and was not part of the recording industry. That's a big thing for me. It's not one person's headphone symphony and not a personal ego project, it's part of a living culture."

Growing listener interest has created a demand for deeper excavation of sonic antiquity. Because Archeophone deals in the earliest era of recording, that process means salvaging archaic artifacts of a lost era (wax cylinders and heavy shellac discs), transferring them to CD, and packaging them with exhaustively researched booklets. The pursuit leads Archeophone and other labels through collector vaults, flea markets, and even eBay. But no recent discovery is as special as a 10-second recording of the French folk song "Au Clair de la Lune," sung by a young child in 1860, 17 years before Thomas Edison's recordings that, until last March, were considered the first document of the human voice.

Already a free stream via firstsounds.org, a site run by a collective of researchers and historians, which includes Martin, the recording will make its official public debut as a 45-r.p.m.–-vinyl single on Dust-To-Digital later this year.

Using a credit card over the Internet to purchase a vinyl record of a song recorded before the light bulb may just represent how far technology has come in cross-wiring history, making it possible for Polk Miller, a Virginian bandleader who died in 1913, to receive Grammy consideration the same year as Coldplay.

"This is part of the cultural subconscious," Martin says. "Reminding us of our history is a very good thing."