Pitchfork

The relentless diggers over at the Dust-to-Digital label have a big holiday season planned, so those of you who aren't buying Kingdom Come the day it comes out can pick up any of the following releases on November 21. But then again, who's to say that Jay-Z fans don't listen to Sacred Harp music?

Dust-to-Digital collected 30 tracks of Sacred Harp singing from 1922 to the present on I Belong to This Band: 85 Years of Sacred Harp Recordings, the CD companion to Awake, My Soul: The Story of the Sacred Harp. Awake, My Soul was the first feature documentary about the singing style, which is also referred to as "shape-note singing" and features some of the most raucous group vocals that have been recorded. (You might be familiar with Sacred Harp singing from the soundtrack to the movie Cold Mountain.) I Belong to This Band comes with a 16-page, saddle-stitched booklet with annotations and an essay by University of Mississippi music professor David Warren Steel.

Then there is the Desperate Man Blues: Discovering the Roots of American Music DVD and its accompanying soundtrack. The film features Joe Bussard-- "king of record collectors"-- "telling the story of 'America's real music' with passionate enthusiasm in his own inimitable style," according to a press release. The DVD includes the documentary and a half-hour featurette; the soundtrack has tracks by Charley Patton, Son House, the Carter Family, Uncle Dave Macon, and Blind Willie McTell, among others.

The label will add two more releases to its November 21 schedule with the release of one box set and a sampler for another one that is forthcoming. How Low Can You Go?: Anthology of the String Bass is the first ever anthology of the instrument, and its three CDs will come with a 96-page book full of "essays, historic articles, and annotations for each track by [music scholar] Dick Spottswood."

The Art of Field Recording box set will not be released until late next year, but Dust-to-Digital will release a single CD sampler of the five disc box set-- a "collaboration with renowned music archivists Art and Margo Rosenbaum [who] record music traditions in a way few others could"-- along with the rest of their November releases. And though no artists are mentioned, the tracklist sounds like a regular back-country party: "antebellum spirituals, lined-out hymns of country churches, old time frolic tunes, bottleneck blues, hammer-and-pick work songs, dance music of fiddle bands, unaccompanied mountain ballads, and backwoods banjo tunes."