Atlanta's Dust-to-Digital records has long been committed to unearthing forgotten bits of Americana, re-tooling ancient folk songs for a whole new generation of fans. Happily, Dust-to-Digital's output is just as good at highlighting the roots of modern music (see 2001's expansive collection of secular songs, Goodbye, Babylon) as it is at exposing genres, trends, and sounds that didn't make it long past 1945: How Low Can You Go?, a rollicking coming-of-age story for the string bass, and I Belong to This Band, 85 years worth of shape-note performances, make no real attempt at explaining away the subsequent marginalization of their respective jams. But they do manage to celebrate all the strange, cumbersome, and preposterous traditions born from American soil.

I Belong to This Band: 85 Years of Sacred Harp Recordings follows the practice of shape-note singing from 1922 through to the present (although most of the songs here are actually much older), offering 30 distinct cuts, spanning a mess of geographies, years, and intentions. Shape-note singing, a church-based southern song system based in four notes (sung as fa, sol, la, and mi), was initially designed as an all-inclusive, participatory choral tradition-- it's not necessary to know how to read music to sing shape notes, most songs are transposed a capella, and each piece is specifically engineered for swarms of singers, meaning the whole always trumps the parts. Although there are several shape note songbooks, The Sacred Harp is the most celebrated collection (published in 1844, by Benjamin Franklin Wright and Elisha J. King, it contains over 250 songs), and somewhere along the way, it became the movement's lone manifesto and remains tucked under the pillows of dedicated shape-note singers everywhere-- appropriately, each track included here was born from The Sacred Harp.

Maybe the very best thing about shape-note singing is the croaky, full-body hollers the form demands; because the end result is one voice, shape-note singers don't worry so much about tone and pitch, bellowing and shouting with big, unabashed confidence. I Belong to This Band coughs up some appropriately stellar performances: in 1960, S. Whitt Denson decided to perform "New Morning Sun", a shape-note song written by his father, S.M. Denson, nearly 50 years earlier. Whitt sings each part separately and layers the vocals back together, creating what he dubbed "a one-voice quartette"-- the result is joyful and otherworldly, full of weird, perfect harmonies. "Cuba", sung by the Alabama Sacred Harp singers on October 29, 1928 is a solid example of classic shape-note harmony, with each voice somehow both distinct and perfectly blended, while "Save, Lord, or We Perish", performed at the Henagar-Union Convention on July 2, 2006, proves that expert shape noting has hardly disappeared.

The tracks here aren't arranged chronologically, which, theoretically, seems counterintuitive-- but when all that's involved is the human voice, it becomes instantly evident that the noises we make when we open our mouths and bellow don't change all that much, whether it's 1928 or 2006. This isn't the only collection of its type-- see also Alan Lomax's Southern Journey Volumes 9 and 10: Harp of 1000 Strings, or Religion is a Fortune: Sacred Harp Singing-- but it is the first to so seamlessly reveal the hopeless continuity of the human voice.

Meanwhile, How Low Can You Go? celebrates the player Eddie Dean dubs "the man in the middle, the humble workman with bloodied hands and nary a nod from the crowd," the ever-overlooked bassist: The first collection devoted solely to the giant, awkward string bass, How Low Can You Go? is a mind-blowing assemblage of bass-centric (and mostly jazz) tracks from 1925-1941. With three discs (the first two were recorded predominantly in New York City, the third in Chicago) and an impressive book of liner notes (sections are subtitled with phrases like "Basses vs. Tubas, Tubas Lose"), How Low Can You Go? is both impossibly informative and stupidly fun. Featuring tracks from the Harlem Hot Shots, Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, Cab Calloway, Jelly Roll Morton, Jimmie Rodgers, Duke Ellington, the Midnight Rounders, and plenty more, How Low Can You Go? starts out as a compelling historical document, then promptly devolves into the party soundtrack you've always craved: raucous, bouncy, and mostly unstoppable. Spin Jelly Roll Morton's "Black Bottom Stomp" or Walter Page and his Original Blue Devils' "Squabblin'" and see how long you can stand still.

Dust-to-Digital may not be expecting to land a hot new track on "Grey's Anatomy," but the label is still pumping out some of the most vital and exciting contemporary releases: When you're exhausted by standard guitar-synth-drums get-ups, check their warehouse, and prepare to move.