He Was All Ears: 'Worlds of Sound: The Story of Smithsonian Folkways'

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IN HIS PREFACE to "Worlds of Sound: The Story of Smithsonian Folkways," author Richard Carlin calls label founder Moses Asch "difficult and endearing." Carlin knows firsthand, having worked for Folkways in the mid-'70s, and he related a story about Asch's temperament.

"Moe felt that recordings should be flat; that they should just represent the actual performances and you shouldn't fiddle around with them," Carlin said. "So, one day he said to me, 'Stereo is a lie.' He had this deep, throaty, Eastern European voice. And I said, 'Well, any recording is a lie. If the person is not there, there's manipulation of some kind.' And he had an office full of little African sculptures, and reached behind his desk and threw one at me.

"You could never predict what he would say or do," Carlin continued, "but on the other hand he would give you complete freedom and control. In the '40s, when he was recording African-American musicians; he treated them with a dignity and freedom that no other label would have dreamed of. Or people who nobody else would touch, that were really like hippies, that people thought were crazy, they could come and record any time."

Before his death in 1986, Asch released more than 2,000 records, discovered the likes of Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly and Pete Seeger, and worked with eccentric record collector Harry Smith, whose "Anthology of American Folk Music" is but one of many Folkways landmarks. There are also recordings of trains and bugs, speeches by Alfred Einstein and Franklin Roosevelt, poetry by Langston Hughes and Nikki Giovanni, and the roots music of Africa, Bali and beyond.

Now housed at the Smithsonian, Folkways' massive archives are thoroughly explored and explained in Carlin's "Worlds of Sound." And because Asch's donation to the Smithsonian mandated that all his recordings remain print, inspired readers can immediately go download tracks from smithsonianglobalsound.org. In other words, Folkways represented an early version of a long-tail business.

"Moe did everything backward," Carlin said. "Basically, he came up with this way of working where he would do extremely short runs — like [pressing] 200 or 300 records. And by selling a small quantity of a lot of different records over a long period of time, he was able to support himself" — as well as invaluably document a difficult and endearing world of 20th century sound.

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Photo courtesy Smithsonian Folkways