Folkways Records. Encyclopedia Of American Folklore

Recording company founded by Moses Asch and Marian Distler in 1949, the third record
company Asch had started. The earlier Asch and Disc labels had ended in bankruptcy, but
Folkways was a success by almost any standard. Between 1949 and 1986, Asch issued
more than 2,000 LP titles on the Folkways label (the early 78-rpm albums were all
reissued on LP). Folkways was a key participant in the folk-music revival from the 1940s
on, and it published many tides recorded, compiled, or annotated by folklorists,
ethnomusicologists, and anthropologists.
The record business has always been dominated by a few major recording companies
with their own distribution systems. National in scope and corporate in organization, they
usually left the smaller niche markets to smaller companies until those markets proved
profitable enough to invest in. The small companies used other forms of distribution and
sold to targeted audiences. Folkways was one such relatively small company. Its market
consisted largely of libraries and the urban middle class; its editorial policy was the
opposite of cor porate—based on the vision of a remarkable individual, Moses Asch, and
a group of collaborators who advised him. Raised in an international, politically-active,
urbane, literary home, Asch created a company that was international in scope, included
hundreds of albums of literature, and captured the intense creativity of the diverse
musical, literary, and political activities of his times.
Several key features distinguished Folkways Records from most other niche-market
record companies. First, Folkways did not specialize in any given genre or ethnic group:
its recordings ranged from the last chanters in Tierra del Fuego to African polyphony,
Appalachian fiddle players, rural blues singers, American Indian chanters, John Cage and
electronic music, and a large number of children’s artists. The Folkways catalog included
hundreds of spoken-word albums in dozens of languages, natural sounds, and
documentaries of current events from the McCarthy era to Watergate, with a strong series
on the civil rights movement. Second, every Folkways record had some kind of pamphlet
inserted in die jacket. These notes varied from a few sheets with song lyrics to fifty or
more tightly printed pages with extensive descriptions of context and style. This format
was ideally suited for bringing unfamiliar material before the public, as well as for
schools and libraries. Third, once a record was published, it was not deleted from the
catalog. This was extremely rare in an industry that traditionally focused on hits and
deleted slow-selling items without compunction. Asch not only kept Folkways records in
print, he sometimes published recordings that the major labels had not kept in print in
order to bring the music of earlier periods to a new audience—as in the famous
Anthology of American Folk Music (1952) compiled by Harry Smith, which influenced
many folk-revival musicians, folklorists, and others.
Moses Asch was ahead of his times in his interest in wedding print, visual media, and
sound into a single package—which today would be labeled “multimedia.” He was a
partner in Oak Publications, which published songbooks of many Folkways artists. He
was involved with SingOut! magazine in the early years. Some of his “liner notes” became separate books—as in his instruction albums. At one time he called his operation
“Record, Book, and Film Sales.”
Folkways published recordings that other companies would not touch for political,
economic, or other reasons. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Folkways published
blacklisted performers—among them Pete Seeger, with fifty-four albums on Folkways—
and the only known recordings of Jose Miguels, a Communist Portuguese poet living in
exile. Folkways would publish recordings for which sales projections were minimal
partly because Asch wanted to represent the whole world, and partly because he
estimated that no matter what the recording, he could sell about 400 copies. If he kept the
costs low enough (and he was well known for doing so), he could publish almost
anything. This was one reason he published so many field recordings—they were
inexpensive to produce, and they were recordings of music made in a more natural
context than that of a recording studio.
During the 1960s, the success of the folk-music revival turned a niche market into a hit market. This brought both the major companies and new
independent record labels into the field. With their larger royalties and wider distribution,
they attracted many artists who earlier might have published on Folkways. In the 1970s
and 1980s, a similar process occurred with music from other parts of the world
(“Worldbeat”). Folkways survived as a label characterized by field recordings and largely
supported by its sales of recordings for children.
Although some Folkways titles are more enduring than others, the Folkways Records
catalog came to include a vast number of highly significant recordings. Largely through
the efforts of Ralph Rinzler, Folkways Records was acquired by the Smithsonian
Institution, which committed itself to keeping all of the recordings in print, in 1987. In
addition to the master tapes and associated rights, the Smithsonian acquired the business
papers and files of the company. The collection is housed in the Smithsonian’s Center for
Folklife Programs and Cultural Studies, which archives the papers, maintains the entire
collection in print on cassette, and started Smithsonian/Folkways Recordings in 1988 to
reissue selected Folkways titles as well as new projects. The center subsequently acquired
two other small record labels, Cook and Paredon. A free catalog of Folkways recordings,
as well as those of Cook and Paredon, may be obtained by writing the Center.
Anthony Seeger

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