At some point in time Art's hobby began to be taken seriously and since he's become a painting instructor at the University of Georgia they have properly archived all his materials. It's been from these archives that Steven Ledbetter (I'd be interested in knowing if he was related to the late Hughie Ledbetter aka Leadbelly the blues singer) of Dust To Digital has pulled together the material for the first four cd set of Art Of Field Recording Volume 1: Fifty Years Of Traditional American Music
Along with the four discs, containing 110 tracks of music, is included a remarkable 96- page book with photographs of the various performers taken during their recording sessions, or sketches done by the artist of what it was like to record them if no photo was available. The photos were taken for the most part by Art's wife Margo, while all the illustrations are by Art himself. Art's drawings and illustrations are amazing for their attention to detail and the feeling of capturing a moment as it is happening; look at the picture in this review of him recording the Eller Brothers for a good example of that.
But it's the music that's important here and we should talk about that for a bit. First of all the four discs are designated as: Disc One: "Survey;" Disc Two: "Religious;" Disc Three: "Blues;" and Disc Four: "Instrumental and Dance." Think of the first disc as a sampler of all the action to get your mouth watering for the main courses and you'll get the picture clear enough. Although the "Survey" disc contains some gems you won't find anywhere else, including a couple of recordings he first made in 1957 when he was a teenager.
One is of a group of Mexican migrant workers singing an old revolutionary song called "Carabina Treinta-Treinta (30 –30 Rifle)" recorded in a general store. The other, a young migrant white worker Ray Rhodes, aged seven, sang "Fred Adams" in the traditional English/Irish Ballad style that had been practiced in the Appalachians since the first settlers set up their farms.
From there on Disc One surveys all the various types of music that Art has recorded over the years; banjo pickers, gospel singers, harmonica players, fiddlers, and almost any other type and style of what is called Americana music (in spite of it being Anglo/Irish, Scottish, African, and Canadian in origin). Disc Two maybe called "Religious" but it focuses entirely on Christian music so it might just a well be called Gospel, save for the fact that some of it just doesn't fit into any Gospel music you'll have heard until now.
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