Moses Asch

Moses Asch (December 2, 1905 – October 19, 1986) was an American recording engineer and record executive. He founded Asch Records, which then changed its name to

Life and work

Moses Asch was born in

In 1912, the Asch family left Poland, on account of antisemitism, and settled in a suburb of Paris. In 1915, as war engulfed France, the family emigrated to New York. After the war, Asch studied electronics at a technical Hochschule in Koblenz, Germany. He returned to New York to commence work as an audio engineer.^[2]

In 1938, his father's employer,

In 1952, filmmaker and ethnomusicologist Harry Smith compiled for Asch the Anthology of American Folk Music,^[1] a collection of indigenous southern and mid-western US folk songs, which was the first record to conscientiously not differentiate between black and white folk singers upon Smith's request. Smith said of Asch in an interview on the WBAI radio's "The Sing Out! Radio Show", and repeated the story in an interview with John Cohen in Sing Out! magazine, that he had shipped the most precious records in his collection from San Francisco to Asch in New York. Asch initially refused to pay the COD charges for the package. Only after days of cajoling, did Asch pay the COD charges. As it turned out, the Anthology became "the most important collection of its type", according to Asch.

Asch had a significant recording relationship with James P. Johnson, described as the Father of Stride Piano. Johnson made a significant series of recordings for several labels controlled by Asch, including Asch, Stinson, Disc, and Folkways. On the Stinson album, New York Jazz, Johnson recorded five numbers which he stated could be heard in New York in the 1910s, in addition to the first recorded piano solo of Scott Joplin's, Euphonic Sounds. This established the link between the stride piano of Johnson, and the ragtime of Joplin, from which stride is descended.

One principle behind Asch's direction of the Folkways label was that he never deleted a single title from the Folkways catalogue. Asch said, "Just because the letter J is less popular than the letter S, you don't take it out of the dictionary."^[5] After his death, the Folkways recordings were acquired by the Smithsonian Institution, and Asch stipulated in his will that no titles were to be deleted, and that unreleased master tapes in the Folkways archive should be explored.^[5] The Smithsonian acquisition of the Folkways archive was, in part, funded by the release of the album A Vision Shared: A Tribute to Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, which featured contributions by Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, U2 and other artists.^[5]

Folk Singer Dave Van Ronk said: "Moe Asch could be an exasperating man, and he would never pay you ten cents if he could get away with five, but he really loved the music."^[6] Neil Alan Marks wrote in The New York Times in 1980: "Folkways Records was for folklorists and musicians the talmudic source for much primary material. Its founder, Moses Asch, may have more to do with the preservation of folk music than any single person in this country."^[2]

Anthropologist Michael Asch is his son.^[7]

References

Further reading

• American National Biography, vol. 1, pp. 661–662.
• Carlin, Richard. Worlds of Sound: The Story of Smithsonian Folkways. New York: Smithsonian Books/Collins, 2008.
  ISBN 0-06-156355-2
• Goldsmith, Peter D. Making People's Music: Moe Asch and Folkways Records. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998.
  ISBN 1-56098-812-6
• Olmsted, Tony. Folkways Records: Moses Asch and His Encyclopedia of Sound. New York,NY: Routledge, 2003.
  ISBN 0-415-93709-4
• Van Ronk, Dave. The Mayor of MacDougal Street. Da Capo Press, 2006.
  ISBN 0-306-81479-X

• Smithsonian Folkways: A history
• Asch Records on the Internet Archive's Great 78 Project