Thousands of songs representing some of the rarest and most uniquely American music borne from the Jazz Age and the Great Depression would have likely been lost to landfills and faded from memory.
Fans and historians have long credited obsessive record collectors for preserving much of that music, and today they can thank a new partnership between UC Santa Barbara and the nonprofit Dust-to-Digital Foundation for making it available to the public for free.
UCSB Library’s Special Research Collections has been uploading music from the foundation’s trove of some 50,000 songs to the university’s Discography of American Historical Recordings (DAHR) database…