Revised August 14, 2021

Record producer Moses Asch disdained chasing profit. He made it his life’s goal to compile an encyclopedia of sound through his Folkways Records. Harry Smith amassed a huge collection of folk music recordings and needed money. In 1952, the two of them issued the Anthology of American Folk Music. It upended the entire music industry.

Before then, a few songwriters and lyricists associated with New York’s Tin Pan Alley provided popular songs for the entire nation, or so they thought. Their sophisticated urban music didn’t satisfy everyone’s musical needs.

In 1917, the recording industry discovered jazz. At mid-century, it figured jazz meant mostly the dance bands led by Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, and other white band leaders.

At the time, urban white men owned all the recording companies. They had a very narrow worldview. Not only did they adhere to the prevailing attitudes about racial separation, they excluded rural America from their view of popular culture. Besides classical music and the two varieties of popular music they most actively promoted, the industry dismissed everything else as “race” or “hillbilly” records.

The idea of race records and hillbilly records

Sometime in the 1920s, Ralph Peer took over leadership of lackluster Okeh Records. Like most record companies, its headquarters were in New York. It tried to cater to the same audience the more successful companies dominated. Peer was among the first recording executives to realize that a vast audience with other tastes existed.

In 1924, he took his recording equipment to Atlanta, where a local record dealer asked him to record two songs by a circus barker called “Fiddling John Carson.” Peer agreed when the dealer promised to buy a thousand copies. He thought the music sounded so awful that no one else would ever be interested.

Those thousand copies sold out the day they arrived in Atlanta, and the dealer ordered another 15,000 copies. Okeh put the record in its catalog and sold half a million copies nationwide.

Peer realized that he had found a new market to exploit. The company’s catalog had German, Polish, Swedish, and other foreign records in its catalog, but Peer, afraid to advertise Negro records, invented the terms “race” and “hillbilly.”

Other record companies followed Okeh’s lead and adopted Peer’s new categories. These implied the kind of rigid racial separation that American society took for granted at the time. They did not reflect reality. In fact, on the local level people of different races did interact and did influence each other musically.

Meanwhile, traveling singers such as Woody Guthrie and scholars such as Alan Lomax worked hard to bring folk music to a wide audience. Lomax worked for the Library of Congress to make field recordings of folk musicians. It would probably never have occurred to any of those musicians to try to make commercial recordings.

Asch and Folkways Records

Moses Asch, son of novelist Sholem Asch, was born in Warsaw, Poland but raised in New York City. His father sent him to Germany for study, where other students constantly told him that America lacked any true folk music. He didn’t believe it.

Asch opened his first recording company in 1940. It and his second company both failed, but he achieved success with the establishment of Folkways Records in 1947. Its first issue was a set of children’s songs sung by Lead Belly.

John Lomax, Alex’s father, had found Lead Belly serving prison time for murder and secured his release. Lead Belly became a well-known folk singer. He later met Asch, who never turned down an interesting recording project.

Newspaper columnist Walter Winchell published his disapproval of entertaining children with songs by a murderer. The resulting furor made Folkways Records well known and probably insured its success.

Unlike almost any other record producer in the country, Asch didn’t chase huge profits. He had no interest in finding and promoting popular stars. Instead, he believed that all voices deserve to be heard and all sounds are equally valuable. He wanted to preserve recordings of everything the more commercially minded companies ignored. And he never let anything go out of print.

The Folkways catalog grew to more than 2,000 albums by Asch’s death in 1986. It issued recordings of music from all over the world, spoken word recordings in various languages (including political speeches among other things), sounds of various machines, and natural sounds (from land, sea, and even outer space.) Asch arranged for the Smithsonian Institution to take over the company at his death, thus ensuring that each album would always be available for sale.

Harry Smith and his record collection

Smith had begun to study anthropology at the University of Washington in 1943. After completing five semesters, he visited Berkeley, California for a weekend. While there, he was introduced to San Francisco’s intellectual and artistic community, Woody Guthrie’s music, and marijuana.

He dropped out of college and became something of a San Francisco hippie well before that term was ever coined. Smith became a highly regarded maker of experimental films and abstract painter. He also began collecting records.

Most record collectors of the time specialized in either classical music or jazz. Amassing a significant collection of either genre would have been expensive. Smith had very much liked what he heard from Woodie Guthrie. He despised the terms “race” records and “hillbilly” records but respected the music. No one else much cared about it, so he made it the focus of his collection.

Abstract art became successful and respectable enough that a Museum of Non-Objective Painting (now called the Guggenheim Museum) opened in New York. In 1950 its director saw to it that Smith received a grant from Solomon Guggenheim. Smith decided to relocate permanently to New York.

By that time, he had acquired thousands of wax cylinders and 78s. Finding himself short on cash, he tried to sell his collection to Asch.

Instead, Asch suggested that he compile an anthology and write scholarly notes to accompany it. Smith chose 84 songs, which Asch released in three volumes of two LPs in 1952. Smith had no intention of following the prevailing categories of “race” and “hillbilly” records. Instead, he set about to subvert it. He juxtaposed selections that clearly showed how white and black musicians influenced each other. He introduced other races as opportunities arose.

The Anthology of American Folk Music

Smith’s scholarly notes provide important historical information about the recording industry in general. They also display his eccentricity. In addition to his notes on each selection, he describes the history of recorded sound. Folk music was first issued on wax cylinders, the earliest format for commercial recording. The perfection of the disc in 1888, being less expensive, opened the market to a larger audience.

His collection included both very early recordings and very recent ones. The Anthology of American Folk Music, however, includes nothing recorded before 1927. That’s the year that electric recording enabled really accurate reproduction of sound for the first time.

It also omits anything recorded after 1932. By that time the Great Depression had greatly reduced record sales and therefore new releases. The kinds of music Smith collected bore the brunt of the cuts. His collection lacked enough recent records to provide a really good cross-section.

Within these limitations, Smith served up a world of folk music stranger and more exciting than anything Guthrie, Lomax, and others had ever made public.

He organized each of three volumes differently. All the songs in the first volume are ballads. Some of them originated in England or Scotland in or even before the eighteenth century. Others commented on then-current events. Some were about major national or international stories, like the sinking of the Titanic or the murder of President McKinley. Many commemorated local stories. Smith ignored all racial, chronological, and geographical considerations to present them thematically.

The second volume, even more subversive, makes musical connections between adjacent pieces. These pieces exhibit a variety of forms, such as African American spirituals and country dances. This structure practically compelled Smith to juxtapose white and black performers. It also allowed him to show how they presented similar phrases and musical ideas.

Apparently, he couldn’t think of a new unifying factor for the third volume, unless an exuberant nihilism counts as a structural principle.

The anthology’s influence

Folkway Records issued the Anthology of American Folk Music in 1952.

The week of July 9, 1955, Billboard listed “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets as the top song. It stayed on top of the charts for eight weeks and became the best-selling record for the entire year. The rock revolution was on. Haley later commented, “Nobody likes rock and roll but the public.”

What do those to facts have to do with each other?

Musical influence

Haley, along with other early rockers such as Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins, derived their singing styles and instrumentation from the rural music of both black and white people.

In other words, it was a combination of “race” and “hillbilly” music. It completely turned its back on more than a century and a half of the kind of “respectable” popular music that began with music from English cities and culminated in Tin Pan Alley.

The music industry fought hard against this new music that threatened to overwhelm their categories for white, urban music and destroy the distinction between its white and black rural categories. That is exactly the outcome Harry Smith envisioned.

Political influence

Earlier proponents of folk music like Woodie Guthrie may have had political leanings that the dominant society frowned upon. But as long as their popularity didn’t threaten Tin Pan Alley, their politics didn’t matter.

Later folk singers, such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, brought pro Civil Rights and anti-war feelings front and center in their music. Some in Congress began to consider all folk music as a tool of various political movements that seemed socialistic and anti-American.

All these rock and folk musicians knew and respected Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. Leading folk musicians performed and recorded much its music.

Could the musical revolution that began in the early 1950s with rock and roll have happened without Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music? Maybe. Maybe not. But it didn’t. Harry Smith boosted not only folk music’s visibility, but the political coloration it took on.

Meanwhile, because the Smithsonian Institution acquired the entire Folkways catalog, the Anthology of American Folk Music is still available. The Smithsonian reissued it on CD in 1997, with pitch correction and elimination of surface noise. In this form it won two Grammy awards.

Sources:

Harry Smith 1923-1991 full biography / Harry Smith Archives – the first version of this post was based on an earlier version of this source, which is no longer available
Moses Asch, 81, founder of Folkways Records, dies / Burt A. Folkart, Los Angeles Times. October 24, 1986
Ralph Peer / PBS American Experience

Smith’s foreword and some of his annotations can be found in Judith Tick (ed.) Music in the USA: A Documentary Companion (Oxford University Press, 2008, ISBN 9780195139884), pp. 502-05.