Take Me to the Water
Immersion Baptism in Vintage Music and Photography 1890-1950 Published by Dust-to-Digital.
Text by Luc Sante, Jim Linderman, Steven L. Ledbetter. Making the past vividly present once again, Grammy winner Dust-to-Digital unveils Take Me to the Water, a revelatory examination of baptismal rites and music. Comprising a beautiful hardcover book and a CD featuring rare, vintage songs and sermons recorded between 1924–1940, Take Me to the Water draws on the collection of Jim Linderman, a scholar of American outsider art, early American folk art and daguerreotype photography. It reproduces 75 sepia photographs that depict amazing scenes of immersion baptisms—the likes of which are rarely seen today—with preacher and baptismal candidates shown immersed in the middle of the river, while the congregation looks on from the riverbank. The CD compiles rare gospel and folk recordings from original 78-rpm records, with artists such as Washington Phillips, Carter Family, Tennessee Mountaineers, the Belmont Silvertone Jubilee Singers and rare vocal recordings of baptismal sermons. Renowned writer Luc Sante provides a history of baptismal rites in America, and writes of this volume: “Whether you have ever actually experienced a baptism or not, whether you are a believer or not, these pictures and the music that accompanies them transmit all the emotional information: the excitement and the serenity, the fellowship and the warmth, the wind and the water… you would have to have a heart of tin not to recognize this as one of the happiest collections of archival photographs ever assembled.”
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