The Asch Series, Part 2: Pete Seeger Saw it All
One icon recalls two others as well as the stubborn iconoclast who oversaw their careers. Listen to a great storyteller tell a story that needs telling, in the audio segments at the bottom of the page
“Moe realized Woody’s genius when nobody else did,” Pete Seeger was telling me. It was January 1987 and bitterly cold on the mountain overlooking the Hudson at Beacon, New York, where Seeger and his wife, Toshi, built the log cabin that was the Seegers’ home for 45 years.
Pete Seeger on the upstate New York mountain where he and his wife, Toshi, made their home for more than 60 years.
Guthrie, a 28-year-old Oklahoman and gifted, unbelievably prolific songwriter, hoboed his way to New York in 1940. Among the many people he met was Seeger, who introduced Woody to a man whom Seeger himself had only recently met, the brilliant, irascible Moses Asch, who built public address systems for a living but whose passion was for making records.
In 1940, Asch (universally known as Moe), founded tiny Asch Records on West 46th Street. Observing Asch’s early, tentative efforts, Seeger was “kind of amused. Here was a man who didn’t really know anything about the recording business, but was going ahead. People said, ‘Well, this is just one more quixotic venture doomed to defeat.’ But they didn’t know the perseverance of Moses Asch.”
.“As an émigré,” continued Seeger [Asch was born in Poland, the son of the novelist and playwright Sholem Asch], “Moe was amazed that this country had such a low regard for its own history. As a Jew, Moe had a high regard for his history, and he knew that European nations had a high regard for theirs. And he comes to this new nation, with so much energy and so much power, which seemed to careen from one adventure to another, and ignore its own past. And here Moe was, a thinking person, and he said, ‘My gosh, here’s a job that needs to be done, and I’ve got a recording machine.’” The job: recording America’s, and eventually the world’s, folk music.
Asch’s gruff manner softened when the unpredictable but immensely likeable Guthrie came around. In April and May of 1944, with Woody ill, often drunk, and unable to perform in public, Asch put him on a small but livable salary—Seeger recalled it as perhaps $45 a week—in return for which Woody showed up every morning, sometimes with his buddy and harmony singer Cisco Houston in tow, and recorded a tremendous number of songs, most of them Guthrie’s own. Asch didn’t merely recognize Woody’s genius; he considered it saleable (and so it was, at least by Asch’s modest standards). Asch was seeing to Woody’s well-being while making what he considered a good investment, starting with Guthrie’s first, 1945, Asch Records release, Woody Guthrie, at least half of whose songs were cut at the marathon session, including “Grand Coulee Dam,” “Gypsy Davy,” and “New York Town.”
Another product of that session was a song with a simple, seven-note melody which, Seeger recalled, “I considered one of Woody’s lesser efforts. Well, I was sure taught a lesson.” In this case at least, the Polish Jew proved to have the better ear for an American anthem than the Yankee WASP. Here’s Woody singing it:
If “This Land is Your Land” is, as Seeger put it, “a triumph of simplicity,” a Guthrie song like “Grand Coulee Dam,” Woody’s paean to “that wild and wasted stream,” the Columbia River, bursts with a Whitmanesque prolixity:
In the misty crystal glitter of that wild and windward spray,
Men have fought the pounding waters and met a watery grave,
Well, she tore their boats to splinters, but she gave men dreams to dream….
By the late 1940s, Guthrie’s behavior was growing disturbingly erratic. His heavy drinking was initially considered the problem, but in 1952, Woody was diagnosed with Huntington’s chorea, a genetic neurologic disorder (Guthrie’s mother and two of his daughters died from its complications). The disease eventually left Guthrie almost completely dysfunctional. Committed to three successive psychiatric hospitals, Woody died, just 55, on October 3, 1967.
One of the singers who contributed to Woody’s April 1944 sessions, who had known Asch since the late 1930s, was Huddie Ledbetter, who went by the name he had acquired in two long stints at Louisiana’s dreaded Angola State Prison Farm: Lead Belly, the self-proclaimed “King of the Twelve String Guitar.”
Seeger: “Some private schools in New York paid Lead Belly a few dollars to sing for children”
Although he tends to be categorized as a bluesman, Lead Belly commanded a vast, multi-genre repertoire: blues, Anglo-American ballads, cowboy songs, slaves’ field hollers, and his own compositions. Born in Shreveport, Louisiana in 1888, Huddie spent much of his young manhood in and out of Angola, where he caught the attention of America’s first great song collector, the Texan, and more or less unreconstructed racist, John Lomax, and Lomax’s son and assistant, Alan. In the mid-1930s, John Lomax brought Lead Belly north, not thinking twice about exploiting Lead Belly’s badman’s reputation—presenting him, for instance, in prison stripes in a “March of Time” newsreel. The April 19, 1937 issue of Life magazine ran a three-page article titled "Lead Belly: Bad Nigger Makes Good Minstrel.” To Time, Lead Belly was “a coal-black, swampland Negro [who] drawled hisw rhyme-spouting improvisations” and couldn’t stay out of jail. This was not the kind of publicity that Lead Belly wanted. Disgusted with Lomax’s promotional stunts, Lead Belly went home to Louisiana.
And reappeared, in 1941, at Moe Asch’s door. As Asch would recall, “Immediately Leadbelly and I were brothers. I understood him, he understood me….He was a great intellect. A real, hard-thinking, practical man…. He really understood what he was, in terms of America, in terms of music and everything else.”
“Leadbelly was barely getting by,” Seeger recalled. “He was on and off welfare, living in a fourth-floor, two-room walkup on the Lower East Side. He was trying very hard to make it in New York. I never saw him without a crease in his pants. And yet what came out of his mouth was wonderful Southern Afro-American folk music. He was the king of the twelve-string guitar. There’s nobody now who can play the instrument with Lead Belly’s straightforward power.”
Asch and Leadbelly understood, and liked, each other, but Moe was not in a position to pay Leadbelly much, nor, as Seeger tells us, did he have any idea of how to market and promote his new artist. Lead Belly didn’t fit into anyone’s categories. Too exotic for white pop-music audiences, he was too rustic for urban, jazz-loving blacks (a Harlem audience once booed him offstage). His first record for Asch, a delightful album of children’s songs, sold 300 copies. Lead Belly never lived to see the folk revival that he helped kindle. Still on welfare, he died in December 1949. Months later, Seeger’s group The Weavers took one of Lead Belly’s signature songs, “Goodnight, Irene,” to #1 on Billboard’s pop chart.
“Fannin’ Street (Mister Tom Hughes Town)”, one of Leadbelly’s most powerful compositions, often covered by other singers, about his youth in the whorehouse district of his native Shreveport, La. Lead Belly’s mastery of his big 12-string Stella is especially evident in the lightning-fast passages towards the song’s conclusion.
In 1947, Moe decided to take a shot at the big leagues. He lowered prices to compete with the major labels, beefed up advertising, “and it was a disastrous failure,” said Seeger. But Asch had gained an essential insight. Prior to any other record man, a nd virtually any businessman, Asch recognized that the business world was splitting into two tiers, the huge and the very small. He’d been wrong, he realized, to expand willy-nilly, flinging himself against major labels such as RCA and Columbia. Far wiser to target a small, specific audience, and in 1948, Folkways Records was born for that very purpose. “Moe predated FM radio and pushcart presses,” said Irwin Silber, the editor of Sing Out! magazine and a longtime colleague of Asch’s: “All the people today who are trying to carve out niches between the conglomerates.”
“And here,” according to Seeger, “is where Moses Asch made a great creative contribution: he worked out a new way of selling records. If I can come out of this interview having made one essential point, it is how impressed I was with the way Moe learned to promote his records. He did not depend on record stores. He didn’t spend a penny on advertising. Here’s what he did.” Moe literally brought his product to his chosen market: teachers and librarians. As Seeger told it, “he put 100 records into a foot locker, got on a plane, and went to the Modern Library Association’s convention. A few weeks later, he got out his foot locker and flew to the Music Educators’ National Conference. He went from one teachers’, or librarians’, convention to another.” He was his own, one-man ad campaign, a burly, heavy-lidded fellow who looked like a Lebanese boxing promoter but could discourse with avuncular charm on Charles Ives, Chippewa healing songs, or the late poems of W.B. Yeats’s. (“Moe called every woman ‘dear,’” groaned his longtime assistant Marilyn Averett in mock exasperation.) And, armed with a Folkways catalog, the teachers, librarians, and musicology professors went home to study the catalog and place their orders: permanent customers, likely as not. Folkways became famous for its liner notes, many written by authorities in their given field. “Most records came out with a few words on the back cover,” said Seeger. “Moe gave a whole booklet, sometimes a big fat booklet.” Moe expanded Folkways’s mission to documenting sounds from the entire world. And beyond: Folkways FX6200, for one, the ethereal Voices of the Satellites. The label’s new Ethnic Library—"drunken farmers on a Saturday night,” as Asch put it—grew to 1,000 albums of African, Caribbean, or Japanese music, poetry, and narratives. Nor did Moe stop recording great, and not so great, folk and blues singers. The catalog grew to more than 2,000 records, and Moe Asch knew each one’s contents. Nor did it matter a bit to him if a record sold zero copies. It stayed in the catalog. “Do you delete the letter “Q” from the alphabet just because you don’t use it as much as the others?” he liked to say. The catalog was indeed a sort of lexicon: of hope, fueled by Asch’s old-time radicalism. “He was making a dictionary,” Asch’s son, Michael, told me, “and one with a populist intent—when everyone finally understood each others’ voices, the world would be at peace.
Moe was fonder of his collection, musicians grumbled, than of them. Folkways had a built-in ugly aspect: artists didn’t always get paid. They often didn’t get paid. “Especially in the early days, unless you made a special arrangement with Moe, he didn’t pay royalties,” recalled Bess Hawes, Alan Lomax’s sister, an Almanac Singer turned anthropologist and folklorist. A well-known artist like Seeger, who made his living not from his more than three dozen Folkways albums but by non-stop touring, sympathized with his sometimes indigent colleagues, but didn’t complain. “I was delighted to see Moe break the law,” he said, for instance, with the eccentric record collector Harry Smith’s 84-song Anthology of American Folk Music, a 1952 Folkways release whose role in inspiring the second-wave folk revival of the early 1960s can hardly be exaggerated. Taken from Smith’s own collection, it consisted of songs recorded in the 1920s and ‘30s by RCA, Paramount, and other labels, bringing the sounds of the Carter Family, Charley Patton, Blind Willie Johnson, Dock Boggs, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Uncle Dave Macon, and dozens of others to the attention of the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and other neophyte folkies. Smith simply appropriated the songs, signing no royalty agreements with the original labels or with whichever of its artists were still alive (and had probably already been fleeced by those original labels). The Anthology of American Folk Music, one of the country’s most significant, influential records, was a bootleg, plain and simple, until 1997, when Smithsonian/Folkways reissued it and took steps to legalize Smith’s, and Asch’s, pilferage.1
Financially, Folkways was less a corporation than a feudal patriarchy. As mentioned, that was alright by Seeger. “I was so glad to see Moe recording all this valuable stuff that I agreed completely with him: this was stuff that needed to be recorded, and if you had to cut corners here and there….” Seeger let this euphemism for ripping off artists trail off, only to return to the subject a moment later. “Moe poured every penny he could back into that business,” Seeger said. Asch and Marian Distler worked 16-hour days. “I wasn’t going to complain if people didn’t get royalties. Here was a job that was being done, and that needed to be done, and no government in the world was doing it: no capitalist government, no socialist government, no museums. They claimed to be doing it. The Library of Congress claimed to do it, but they had a piddling small catalogue compared to Folkways’. The Musée de ’lhomme claims to be doing it, but they have a piddling small catalog compared to Folkways,” Seeger argued. “All these big, multimillion-dollar operations were inching along, but Moe was galloping, doing the job that needed to be done. I’m perfectly satisfied with the rather occasional royalties I got.”
When Seeger left Folkways for Columbia in 1961, it was, he says, with Asch’s blessing. “Moe said that Columbia would be willing to promote me, to put out advertisements and get my records in the stores. And in the Sixties,” with a burgeoning folk revival, a vigorous civil rights movement, and a growing outcry against the Vietnam War, “Moe felt that this was something I should try. I was dubious about it, and looking back, I’m not sure it was worthwhile. Only one Columbia record of mine sold more than a very small amount. We Shall Overcome sold several hundred thousand copies. [They hoped] they’d get another big seller. They never did. They’d sell twenty thousand of this, thirty thousand of that.” Eventually, Seeger returned to the Folkways fold, content to sell 5,000 copies, a bestseller for Moe.
“If you were going to try to encapsulate this character,” I asked Seeger, “how would you?”
“He was a guy,” Pete replied, “who had a good idea which everybody said was impossible, who concentrated on it and persevered on it, and by the time he died, people were willing to give him some kind of Nobel Prize. He did what everybody said was impossible. It was axiomatic: ‘How are you going to make a living selling one hundred copies of a record in a year? You can’t do it! Moe, wake up! There’s a business world that you have to face!’ And he faced the business world, and he worked out a way to survive right inside it.”
“I see a lot of people as I make the rounds,” in the words of one non-Folkways artist (Dylan had originally aspired to be just that, but things didn’t work out that way). Moe went to one teachers’, or librarians’, or ethnomusicolgists’ convention after another. He was his own one-man ad campaign, a burly, heavy-lidded fellow who looked like a Lebanese boxing promoter but could discourse with charm and erudition on Charles Ives, Chippewa healing songs, or the late poems of W.B. Yeats.
See paragraph 13 of the previous post, #26, for a quick account of the Smithsonian Institution’s acquisition of Folkways Records—the occasion for my writing about Moe Asch in the first place, for Smithsonian magazine’s November 1987 issue.
And so we come to Pete himself, in two audio segments. He’s got three things on his mind: Woody, Leadbelly, and Moe Asch. The first five or so minutes of the first segment are about the two songsters. The rest of Segment One, and all of Segment Two, consist of Seeger’s memories of, and reflection on, the way Moe Asch ran his business. But discussions of businesses, especially one as extraordinary as Folkways Records, can be anything but boring. So dig in. Next up, in a week or so, the third and final installment of The Asch Series.