Down by the River: Dust-to-Digital's Latest Small Miracle

They’re dunked in wide rivers and lazy farm ponds. Some are dropped down holes sawed through winter ice, the better to cool—as Memphis preacher E.D. Campbell once sermonized—that “fire burning in my soul.”

They’re submerged alone and by the dozen, in white robes and their Sunday best. Crowds gather on grassy banks as if for a picnic or fair or game of rounders. Some tote umbrellas, some carry children, some have smiles as broad and beatific as the river Jordan, which these scenes are meant to replicate.

They’re all part of the photographs and recordings that make up Take Me to the Water: Immersion Baptism in Vintage Music and Photography 1890-1950, the latest small miracle from Grammy-winning Atlanta-based imprint Dust-to-Digital. The pictures, discarded artifacts of ecstatic Americana, come from the stash of Jim Linderman, who in his introduction recalls advice he’s plainly taken to heart: “Collect the heck” out of whatever you find interesting.

Bound in hardback with an accompanying CD of rustic gospel and recorded preachifying, Linderman’s sepia-toned images are transformative—even the unholiest among us would be hard-pressed to witness these anonymously snapped pictures without feeling a tug toward the Glory Land. The ritual submersions kindle the human quests for rebirth, purification and a moment of blessed suspension. They’re at once old-timey and timeless—and a little dangerous, too. That backward dive is the ultimate trust fall. When you see the coatless preacher holding an unseen congregate underwater with both hands, you can only hope the sinner is being saved and not drowned.
   
Observe the pair in dark clothing—down-creek from one camera’s lens, past the overhanging tree limbs—who wade into a long finger of bright sunlight that seems to lead up into infinity. Or the girl in the pond with folded arms from whom waves radiate in ever-widening circles, finally rippling off the bottom of the page and up through your fingertips.
   
Linderman writes about the connection between the visual and the aural—a specialty of Dust-to-Digital and Lance Ledbetter, the label’s founder and chief obsessive. Dust-to-Digital debuted in 2003 with Goodbye, Babylon, a six-CD set of vintage religious music and a 200-page book, all packed with raw cotton in a simple wooden box. The label won a Grammy this year with Art of Field Recording Volume I, and released Volume II in January. Take Me to the Water isn’t as far-reaching as those sets, but its thoroughness and focus have a rare effect. Beautifully packaged and meticulously curated, the songs and sermons provide their own kind of baptism into this other time and place. The 25 tracks range from Bill Boyd and His Cowboy Ramblers to Rev. Nathan Smith’s Burning Bush Sunday School Pupils.

They all hew to a single theme, put best by Elder J.E. Burch during a 1927 sermon recorded in Atlanta. His words could serve as this project’s mission statement. “The subject is wash,” he begins. “You wash ladies understand that it’s essential that you want your garments clean. And in the same like mind, our God almighty wants His garments clean. And He tells you to wash… Wash away your guilty conscience. Wash away every evil thought. And you don’t wash, glory to God, with the natural water, but you wash with the word of God.”

Say amen.


Click here to see more photos from Take Me To The Water.