folk music article in the New Yorker

In this week's New Yorker there is a lengthy and wide ranging article by Burkhard Bilger called The Last Verse about the history and preservation of folk music in this country. It touches on collectors, performers, archivists, - the well-known and the obscure. It focuses on the researches of Art Rosenbaum a folklorist, painter, and a professor of art at the University of Georgia, who has spent fifty of his sixty-nine years traveling around the south and the Midwest recording folk musicians. In the article Rosenbaum is traveling with Lance Ledbetter who is described as 31 and the owner of a small record label in Atlanta called Dust-to-Digital and with an encyclopedic knowledge of American Blues, country, and folk music, and what many consider to be the greatest gospel compilation ever made : a six CD set called Goodbye Babylon. Ledbetter's label has also released Art of Field Recording: Vol. 1 , a four CD retrospective of Rosenbaum's work. In this article Rosenbaum and Ledbetter were gathering songs for the second volume. The writer touches on everything from the several folk revivals, audio engineering, the Lomaxes and Harry Smith and a host of other interesting characters.. Rosenbaum is quoted as saying, "We're getting close to the time where there might not be any family or local music traditions, so I've concentrated on preserving those." A bit later the article goes on to say "In the early seventies, when he (Rosenbaum) was teaching art at the University of Iowa, he met a brilliant young songwriter named Greg Brown." He recorded him singing a Civil War Ballad with his grandmother.Great reading - look it up. April 23, 2008__._,_.___