The story of Dust-to-Digital has been told many times over by media far larger than The Bitter Southerner, including a fantastic 2008 piece in The New Yorker by Burkhard Bilger.

But it’s worth spending a little time re-examining how the little basement label first came to the world’s attention 10 years ago — and the effect that had on the lives of Lance and April Ledbetter.

After high school in the small northwest Georgia town of Lafayette, Lance headed to a little northeast Georgia college called Young Harris, which was then a two-year institution. His interest in old-time Appalachian music blossomed there after several visits to the John C. Campbell Folk School, just a half-hour up the road in Brasstown, N.C.

After he transferred to Georgia State University, the giant state school in the middle of downtown Atlanta, he met April Gambill, a Hendersonville, N.C., native who was studying film at GSU. The year was 1999.

“Lance was in my film classes, which was weird because he wasn’t studying film,” April says, sitting across the coffee table from her husband in the living room of their home, upstairs from Dust-to-Digital’s basement HQ. If you walk in their front door expecting to see the accumulated detritus of the obsessive collector, you will be shocked. Downstairs, the tiny warehouse/office is stacked with records and CDs, but those are either inventory or source material. Up here, there is only one neat wall of built-in shelves containing records — the cream of the crop of a collection that is now almost 20 years in the making.

By the time Lance met April, he was already deep into the obsession that would give birth to Dust-to-Digital. Two years earlier, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings had released — for the first time ever on CDs — Harry Smith’s “Anthology of American Folk Music.” The set had originally been released in 1952 in a set of six vinyl records. Perhaps the best short description of the set I’ve seen came from Bilger's 2008 story:

The anthology was divided into three double albums, each illustrated with mystical drawings, and color-coded blue, red, or green, to represent air, fire, and water. The real mysteries, though, lay in the music. Using crackly transfers from his own collection, Smith pulled together every kind of ballad, work song, parlor tune, and Cajun chanson. There were moaning blues by Blind Lemon Jefferson, hair-raising gospel by the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers, and anarchic banjo numbers by Dock Boggs — the sound and spirit of a forgotten world.

The set had a huge influence on a certain cohort of young Americans in the 1950s. By the early 1960s, it was the rosetta stone for every would-be beatnik poet and folk singer in Greenwich Village. It was not by coincidence that Bob Dylan’s first album, in 1962, included his version of “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean,” the 1928 original of which, by the Texas blues singer Blind Lemon Jefferson, appeared on Smith’s anthology.

But by the time Smithsonian Folkways finally released “Anthology” on CD in 1997, 45 years after the original release on vinyl, its scratchy old tunes represented completely unknown territory to a young student like Lance, who was coming up in the era of DIY punk bands and the heyday of college radio. Ledbetter had recently agreed to take over the GSU student radio station’s weekly show of music from the 1920s and ’30s when “Anthology” was reissued on CD.

“One of my friends had worked at WREK (the Georgia Tech student station),” Ledbetter says. “He got the hookup to get discount sets from Smithsonian Folkways. I met him at night in the WREK parking lot. They were in his trunk. It was like we were doing a drug deal or something. We got them for 40 bucks apiece.

“I was living in Decatur so I brought it back to Decatur,” he says. “I was by myself. I cracked it open. I couldn’t believe it. That was like the Big Bang for me. What happened that night was all the old-time music I grew up with as a kid in LaFayette, all the stuff I was exposed to at the John C. Campbell Folk School, all that stuff was just connected for me. I was like, ‘Well this is a whole new world of music.’ That’s when I realized that those six albums were just barely scratching the surface. There were so many rare great records. Even Harry Smith said in interviews that those weren’t the best records. They were just the ones he wanted to put in there because they needed to be documented, but there were a lot of great ones that weren’t on there. And he was right about that.”

Lance started searching for music from the old, weird America anywhere he could find it. At the time, it was mostly from cassette tapes in record-store bargain bins.

“I was just in mass consumption mode,” he says. “At that point in time, as the radio show kept getting better, I kept getting people calling in. I was connecting with people that way and learning about music. The show came on Sunday mornings from 9 to 11. In the South on Sunday morning, a lot of people are either going to church or coming back from church. I was constantly getting requests for gospel. But that was the one genre that I could not find.”

Thus began the obsession that would a few years later produce “Goodbye, Babylon,” Dust-to-Digital’s first product. The obsession could have ended his relationship with April.

“Really soon after we started dating was when Lance started talking about working on ‘Goodbye, Babylon,’” April says. “He was like, ‘I’m going to be really busy and doing all this stuff. I might not have a lot of time to hang out.’ I was like, ‘Is he trying to break up with me? What’s going on?’ I told him, ‘Why don’t you let me help you with that stuff?’”

Thus did Lance Ledbetter and April Gambill become the Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee of the quest to unearth the roots of Southern gospel music — and that quest ruled their lives for the first four years of their relationship. Not long after their adventure began, they found their very own Gandalf the Grey in the form of a Baltimore record collector named Joe Bussard.