Moe Asch

When Moses “Moe” Asch died in 1986, his Folkways Records catalogue was up to two thousand one hundred and eighty-six long-playing records. It included LPs of folk ballads, calypso, Hawaiian and Polynesian and Japanese and African and Yiddish musics, bebop and free jazz and ragtime, gospel and civil rights songs, electronic and avant-garde music, spoken word recordings from Langston Hughes and Eleanor Roosevelt to Timothy Leary and Ho Chi Minh, plays and musicals, holiday records, humor records, children’s records, educational and instructional records, natural sound and sound effects records. A lot of it went pretty much unheard, then and now. But some of Asch’s releases changed the course of American popular culture.

Folkways’ extraordinarily broad catalogue reflected Asch’s international upbringing. According to Peter Goldsmith’s excellent 1998 biography of him, Making People’s Music, Asch was born in Poland in 1905, eldest son of the Yiddish writer Sholem Asch. From there the family moved to Berlin, France and New York, where they bounced around from Greenwich Village to the Bronx, Brooklyn and Staten Island. Then he spent a couple of years in Weimar Germany studying radio electronics, returning to Brooklyn in the mid-1920s to begin a career in radio and sound engineering. Along the way he pieced together an idiosyncratic self-education in international folk musics. He first saw John Lomax’s landmark Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, for example, in a book stall on a street in Paris.

During the Depression his company Radio Laboratories installed speaker systems for ILGWU rallies and for Yiddish theaters on the Lower East Side, equipped sound trucks for Franklin Roosevelt’s electioneering in New York, and built a transmitter for the Jewish Daily Forward’s Yiddish radio station WEVD. The call letters of the unabashedly Socialist station stood for Eugene V. Debs. In the mid-1930s he worked with a guitarist on developing electric guitars and amplifiers; that guitarist, who originally performed “hillbilly” music as Rhubarb Red, later became famous as Les Paul. Asch helped the ILGWU produce its hit musical Pins and Needles, which ran from 1937 to 1940, with numbers like “Sing Me a Song With Social Significance” performed by an interracial cast that included Professor Irwin Corey and Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter. A New York Times reviewer noted a particularly pretty number sung for “a darky baby.”

Asch began making records as the Asch Recording Studios in 1939; he followed that with Disc Records, and in 1949 with his famous Folkways label. His first recording was of Yiddish singers too aptly named the Bagelman Sisters. He also trucked a mountain of field equipment out to Princeton to record his father interviewing Albert Einstein. His biggest early success was an album of children’s songs performed by Leadbelly. Woody Guthrie first recorded with him in 1944; it’s said that eighty percent of Guthrie’s recordings were with Asch. In 1952, Folkways issued a six-disc collection, The Anthology of American Folk Music, compiled by a bona-fide crazed American genius, Harry Smith. Ethnomusicologist, anthropologist, filmmaker, record producer, alchemist, drunk, mooch, psychedelic adventurer, speed freak and self-defeating crank, Smith died, poor and obscure, in the Chelsea Hotel in 1991. Since then whole books and conferences have been devoted to analyzing the fractal web of ideas and influences connecting him to the entirety of downtown and underground culture in New York City in the second half of the twentieth century. As a musicologist he made field recordings of everything from Kiowa peyote songs to the street sounds outside Allen Ginsberg’s window to his friend Lionel Ziprin’s grandfather, Rabbi Naftali Zvi Margolies Abulafia, lying in his bed on the Lower East Side singing ancient Hebrew songs he learned growing up in Galilee. The melody of one, startlingly, is recognizable, note for note, as Dick Dale’s 1962 surf guitar classic “Misirlou,” which made a big comeback in the Pulp Fiction soundtrack in the 1990s. Dale had heard it played on an oud by his Lebanese uncle, who knew it as a popular Greek song about a beautiful Egyptian girl (misir lou) from the 1920s.

Smith met Asch shortly after moving to New York from San Francisco. Always broke, he offered to sell Asch his large collection of old, obscure 78s. Asch had the idea for The Anthology, for which Smith selected eighty-four tracks of blues, Cajun, jugband, bluegrass, gospel and “race” records released in the 1920s and 1930s and not heard since. Because these musics are so well-known now it’s almost impossible to imagine what a treasure trove of shattering revelations The Anthology was for the young listeners of Bob Dylan’s generation. Dylan memorized every song on the six records and continues to perform them today. All modern folk music is informed in some way by The Anthology, and much rock as well.

Because of the Guthrie records, The Anthology and other recordings, Folkways had colossal prestige among folk musicians, and just about every performer on the scene wanted to record his or her own record with Asch. Through the ‘50s and into the '60s Pete Seeger, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Cisco Houston, Dave Van Ronk, Phil Ochs, Mike Seeger’s New Lost City Ramblers, Janis Ian, Richie Havens and others would do so, some of them many times. Marketing and sales were never Asch’s strong suits. While some Folkways albums sold well, most did not, and very many sold fewer than two hundred copies. What little artists got paid for recording with Folkways they had to pry out of the notoriously tight-fisted Asch, who, to be fair, was perpetually strapped for cash.

The Smithsonian bought the label after Asch died and kept every single Folkways album in print – not just all the world music and plays and poetry, but even Speech After the Removal of the Larynx, Sounds of the Junkyard, The International Morse Code: A Teaching Record Using the Audio-Vis-Tac Method and Corliss Lamont Sings for His Family and Friends a Medley of Favorite Hit Songs from American Musicals. Lamont, a well-known Marxist professor who taught at Harvard, Columbia and the New School, was seventy-five when he sat down at the piano and belted out an LP of songs like “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” and “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes.” It was not a big seller, but it was an album only Moe Asch would have put out.

By John Strausbaugh