Two things I love put together: vinyl and Jack White's ideas.
White's label, Third Man Records, are planning to release the entirety of the label Document Record on vinyl. DR owns way over 25,000 recordings of pre-war blues music. Jack feels as though these should be available to the public, and he doesn't even care if he makes any money off of the releases.
Jack said, "It's this amazing time period where lots of different things came together. The Depression's hitting, newly-started record companies are trying to sell records to urban people, and then they decided, 'Why don't we sell records to black people in the South too? We need to record the music that they like.' So they brought a lot of these Blues musicians up to Chicago and Wisconsin to record and they were recording the first moments of modern music.
"This was the first time in history that a single person was writing a song about themselves and speaking to the world by themselves. A man with a guitar or a woman singing by herself a capella.
" A lot of these records were just ignored once more popular music came along in the '40s. The Big Band era started and the war started and people kinda forgot about a lot of these Blues musicians.
"Those musicians had become janitors, going back to farming, and [the record companies] had to go down to see if they could still discover these people."
The history behind this music is insanely exciting and I'm looking forward to learning more about it through the music. The first installment of these releases was on January 29th, but there are more to come. This almost-lost music is still around and begging to be heard.