#moses asch

[kdo-three]

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Woody Guthrie - Talking Sailor (1944) (AKA "Talking Merchant Marine") Woody Guthrie from: My Dusty Road Box Set (2009) [CD 1: Woody's "Greatest" Hits] Hard Travelin': The Asch Recordings, Vol. 3 [1998 Compilation]

Folk | Talking Blues | Protest | WW II | Anti-Fascist | Merchant Marines

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Personnel: Woody Guthrie: Vocals / Guitar

Produced by Moses Asch

Recorded: @ Moses Asch Studio in New York City, New York USA 1944

[gregorygalloway]

The Anthology of American Folk Music was released on 9 August 1952.

The 84 songs over 3 volumes (titled, "Ballads," "Social Music," and "Songs”) were compiled by Harry Smith, taking songs from his personal collection of 78 rpm releases from 1926-1933.

Moses Asch had approached Smith about selling his record collection, but Smith convinced him to release the collection on Asch’s Folkways label.

The collection was almost entirely ignored upon its initial release, selling only 50 copies in its first year (with 47 going to libraries) - the first press review of the collection did not appear until 1958 - but Asch kept the title in print for 30 years before running into trouble with clearance issues (Asch had failed to secure permission for many of the songs in the collection).

The Anthology of American Folk Music was not ignored by musicians however, as nearly everyone in the folk music scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s was influenced by it, including Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, John Fahey (”I'd match the Anthology up against any other single compendium of important information ever assembled. Dead Sea Scrolls? Nah. I'll take the Anthology”), Pete Seeger, and Dave Van Ronk (”We all knew every word of every song on it, including the ones we hated”).

[historybizarre]

The Story Of Woody Guthrie's 'This Land Is Your Land'

Folklorist Nick Spitzer tells the story of Woody Guthrie's leftist national anthem.

He was irritated by Irving Berlin's "God Bless America," sung by Kate Smith, which seemed to be endlessly playing on the radio in the late 1930s. So irritated, in fact, that he wrote this song as a retort, at first sarcastically calling it "God Blessed America for Me" before renaming it "This Land Is Your Land." Guthrie's original words to the song included this verse:

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me. The sign was painted, said 'Private Property.' But on the backside, it didn't say nothing. This land was made for you and me.  

This verse was recorded by Moses Asch in 1944, but not released. In fact, Guthrie's recorded version was more or less lost until Smithsonian archivist Jeff Place heard the acetate master during a 1997 transfer of the recording to a digital format.

[greco-roman-jewess]

Today I learned Moses Asch, son of Yiddish novelist Sholem Asch, produced Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s 1924 recording of “I Wish I Was A Mole In the Ground”

What a weird moment of my world colliding.

[rilm]

A Folkways Anniversary

  Folkways Records, now Smithsonian Folkways, turns 70 this month! The son of Moses Asch, the company’s founder, tells the story:

“When my father founded Folkways Records in 1948, it was his third record company. The first was Asch Records founded in the 1930s, on which he released the first recordings of Lead Belly.”

“The second was Disc Records, founded during World War II….While initially a…

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[cbjustmusic]

To mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of Folkways Records (May 1, 1948). Here is Pete Seeger on Folkways founder Moses Asch.

[dyingforbadmusic]

Rules for running a record label, by Moses Asch of Folkways Records

Never sign a star, it's too costly Never press more records than dictated by immediate demand All records within [the] Folkways collection remain available to the public whether they sold 5 copies or 500

– Moses Asch, Folkways Records

Source: Podcast - The Folkways Collection - Episode 3: Folkways: An American Canon

[protoslacker]

In 1952, a twenty-nine-year-old record collector named Harry Everett Smith squirreled himself away in a two-room office at 111 West Forty-Seventh Street, chewing on peyote buttons and compiling a six-LP compendium for Folkways Records. The Anthology of American Folk Music, which was released by Folkways in 1952 and reissued on CD by the Smithsonian in 1997, was culled exclusively from Smith’s 78 collection and contains only songs issued between 1927 and 1932, that fruitful five-year span between the advent of electrical recording and the apex of the Great Depression.

Amanda Petrusich in Pitchfork. Excerpt from Do Not Sell At Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World's Rarest 78rpm Records I Saw America Changed Through Music