The Asch Series, Part 1 of 3: The Bahamian Guitar Genius and Upstart Record Label That Changed Ry Cooder's Life

Without the influence of Joseph Spence and Moses Asch, the work of one of our greatest living musicians and musical thinkers would have turned out entirely differently

The irascible Moses Asch (1905-1986), a businessman with the soul of an artist

If this tale is highly self-referential, its multiple storylines and characters intersecting repeatedly and surprisingly (even if some of those characters never met, or even knew that each other existed), it’s because the story takes place within the small and insular world of late-’50s and early-’60s folk music: musicians, enthusiasts, and entrepreneurs without whom our lives would be all the poorer.

As the guitarist Ry Cooder tells his part of the story (you can hear him tell it below), the first time he heard the music of Joseph Spence, he could hardly believe his ears. “I thought, ‘What on earth can this be?” It was 1964 and Cooder was a precocious guitar virtuoso of 17 (he’s 77 today) who rarely ventured beyond his hometown LA. Joseph Spence was a 54-year-old guitarist and “vocalizer” (the growls, mutterings, grunts, and coughs that Spence emitted while he played could hardly be called singing) from Andros, the largest of the hundreds of islands that make up the Bahamas archipelago.

Cooder’s response to hearing Spence, he told me in 1987, “was to drop everything else I was doing” and devote himself to figuring out how Spence constructed such marvelous guitar parts.

The Bahamian (the kid barely knew where the Bahamas were) was, Cooder realized, “an original musical thinker who works out something that’s on a real high level of primitiveness.” High level of primitiveness? As paradoxical as that may sound, it’s exactly how Cooder has characterized the work of another self-taught genius he admires, the 1930s Mississippi Delta singer/guitarist Robert Johnson. As Ry Cooder sees it, Johnson’s and Spence’s achievement was to take a time-honored, communally developed, ie. folk, tradition to great heights of complexity and skill, while remaining within that tradition. Robert Johnson was the king of the Delta blues singers, but he never broke through to jazz (as far as we know). Johnson would have been at sea playing with his contemporary Louis Armstrong, whose level of sophistication far outstripped Johnson’s. “Robert Johnson made his strides,” said Cooder, “by playing what everybody else played, but doing it a whole lot better.”¹

Hence Cooder’s delight at encountering Spence: here was another high-level primitive. Cooder came to regard Spence as one of his two great masters; the other was the Hawaiian slack-key guitarist Gabby Pahinui.

The Spence record that so entranced the teenaged Cooder was Spence’s first collection, which bears the elongated title Music of the Bahamas, Volume 1: Bahamian Folk Guitar—Joseph Spence. It was recorded on Spence’s front porch in 1958 and released the following year. (Three of the songs recorded that day were left off the album and appear on a later Folkways collection of Bahamian music.)

How had Spence’s record come to Ry’s attention? No doubt the same way its label had. “The first music my parents had in the house was classical,” Cooder told me in 2008.² “But these friends of theirs, a left-wing blacklisted couple, had the good shit, the Folkways Records: Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads, Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, the Almanac Singers’ Talking Union. The one that really got to me was Dust Bowl Ballads,” not simply the music, but the whole package, with its cover photograph of a defeated-looking man, a farmer, probably, with no soil left to till, trudging with his children into their broken-down shack, a dust storm visibly closing in.³

…………….Dust Bowl Ballads, Woody Guthrie, Folkways Records, 1950…………

Where was all this taking place, a five-year-old Cooder wondered. What was going on here, and who the hell was this singer, with his stories? Folkways Records became the boy’s window onto the world. “These songs were about real events and real people, and Woody Guthrie was someone who had emerged from all that dust and all that trouble.” Ry’s parents’ friends gave the boy the run of their extensive Folkways collection, “and I absorbed it all,” Cooder said. “All of it.” When he got old enough, every week or two Ry and his friends made the long trip, on a bus and then a streetcar, “to this low-rent district way, way downtown, where there was a record store that sold Folkways Records. I bought one per trip.”

Folkways was founded in 1948 by the brilliant, curmudgeonly Moses Asch, who almost singlehandedly created folk music as a commercial genre (and barely made a dime; a Folkways album typically sold 500 copies). “Moe Asch had an ear and he was there,” said Cooder. “Moe was Sam Phillips for the elite”— not the economic elite, but the left-wing intellectuals (Cooder’s mother, though no intellectual, was a Communist Party member) who championed the exploited, the downtrodden, the defeated. Woody’s people.

Cooder’s music and world-view are grounded in Folkways Records. “I only wish I’d met the guy, is all,” he said. From the start, Cooder adored every aspect of the label, from its artists to its sophisticatedly primitive album jackets. “They were usually monochromatic,” said Cooder, “blue on white or grey on white. There was a reason for that packaging”: the content was what was essential, and needed to be conveyed unadorned. “He didn’t want to confuse you with design or graphics. The guy was obviously completely wired into all the facets of what he was doing.

“To me,” continued Cooder, “a Folkways record was a full experience: audio, visual, and tactile. I loved the record jackets’ surface [classic-era Folkways Records had grainy, nubbly surfaces], with their stuck-on piece of paper that gave you the information.” The aesthetic that Cooder so admired was undoubtedly dictated by Asch’s shoestring budget. He had $700 to spend, he’d calculated, and no more than that, per album, including the peanuts that his artists received, many, or some, uncomplainingly. When Cooder made the third of his more than 50 albums, 1971’s Boomer’s Story (which contains Cooder’s version of Joseph Spence’s version of the World War II anthem “Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer”), he asked Warner Records’ art department to give his record the classic Folkways look.

“Well, they wouldn’t let me do it. They said it was too expensive! When the album came out, it looked terrible.” In fact, Boomer’s Story’s jacket pretty effectively conveys Folkways’s aesthetic. Cooder got a second chance 51 years later, when he and Taj Mahal prepared their Grammy-winning 2022 album Get on Board, inspired by the 1953 Folkways album of the same title by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. This time, Cooder insisted that the album cover exactly replicate that of the original. Obligingly, Cooder’s current label, Nonesuch, did his bidding.

Above: the original Get on Board, by the folk/blues greats Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee (Coyal McMahon was a bit player), released by Folkways in 1953. Below, Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal’s Get on Board, with Cooder’s son, Joachim, on drums and bass, released by Nonesuch in 2022.

When I interviewed Cooder about Spence, Moe Asch, and Folkways Records, it was for a profile of Asch, who had recently died. My piece, which appeared in the November 1987 issue of Smithsonian magazine, was occasioned by the Smithsonian Institution’s purchase of Folkways Records. (One of Asch’s conditions for the sale, which, due largely to Asch’s stubbornness on all fronts, took several years to negotiate, was that none of the more than 2,000 records in the Folkways catalog ever be deleted, regardless of sales. None have been, and many new ones have been added.)

While researching the story, I interviewed many others in whose lives Moe Asch had played a significant role, including Pete Seeger, the great ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, and the writer/record producer/music historian Samuel Charters, who worked closely with Asch for decades and came to regard him almost as a second father. Charters’s 1959 book The Country Blues was a major, perhaps the major, stimulus of the blues revival of the early-to-mid-1960s. The book’s companion album of the same name, a compilation of songs recorded by commercial labels in the 1920s and ‘30s, was issued on the Folkways subsidiary RBF. It contained the first Robert Johnson song released since Johnson’s death in 1937: “Preachin’ Blues,” which was Ry Cooder’s introduction to Robert Johnson.

Charters began making field recordings for Folkways in the mid-Fifties, first in the United States, then in the Bahamas. Early in 1987, he told me about his Bahamian fieldwork, including this episode:

“I was living in Fresh Creek, on Andros Island, gathering songs. My wife⁴ and I were simply walking through the settlement one day. Some fellows were building a house, and we heard this incredible music coming from where they were working. It sounded to me like two guitar players. There was only one man sitting against a wall with a guitar, so I looked behind the wall for the second one. There was no one there.” The two guitarists were both Joseph Spence.

“I had never heard his name,” said Charters, “I had no idea who he was. He was talking to his friends, smoking his pipe, and growling his songs. I said, ‘Do you want to come and play and make a tape?’ And he just said, ‘All right,’ and off we went to Spence’s house, accompanied by the entire settlement. They all gathered around the front porch as Spence sat down to play and I set up my gear. Spence and the villagers talked, or shouted, back and forth while he played. It was so wonderfully chaotic.”⁵

And so it came about that Sam Charters recorded the very songs, the very performances, that would capture a young Ry Cooder’s imagination a few years later.

Above: Joseph Spence’s first album, Music of the Bahamas - Volume 1: Bahamian Folk Guitar - Joseph Spence, rec. by Samuel B. Charters, Folkways Records, 1959. This is the entire album, whose first song, “Comin’ in on a Wing and a Prayer,” became a favorite among Spence’s fans. Below: Ry Cooder’s version of “Wing and a Prayer,” from his third album, Boomer’s Story, Warner Records, 1971.

“Listening to Spence was one of the most stunning experiences I’ve ever had as a field recorder,” Charters said. “The total musicality. The total individuality. Here was the kind of musician you dream of, who was part of a tradition and yet was using it in a completely individual way. And what struck me was that he was a stonemason [according to another source, Spence had retired by now], who did terrible things to his hands. He had incredibly strong, stubby fingers, and played a big guitar, I don’t remember what brand.” [Later photographs, taken after Spence was well known, show him cradling a beautiful Martin.]

“So he finished playing and walked down towards the water surrounded by a group of children. I saw him playing checkers later that afternoon. He played checkers the same way he played guitar: grumbling, smiling, shouting at everybody, laughing all the time.”

That was the last Charters saw of Spence for several years. When that first Folkways album came out in 1959, it piqued the attention of not a few listeners, and a handful of American and British musicians found their way to Andros to sit at the master’s feet. In 1963 or ‘64, as Charters recalled, the jazz promoter George Wein booked Spence on an American tour, and the word was fully out: here was an authentic folk genius, whose music a significant number of people were happy to pay to hear. Spence toured America several times, released a half-dozen or so albums, and influenced not merely Ry Cooder, but Cooder’s old partner Taj Mahal, among others. When Spence died, aged 73, in 1984 in Nassau, the Bahamas, several tribute albums were recorded, because this was a revered figure in America’s, and the world’s, folk-music circles, an original thinker who’d worked something out on a real high level of primitiveness.

1. From my interview with Cooder in autumn 1991 for an article on Robert Johnson’s legacy; the story appeared in the December 1991 issue of Musician magazine.

2. This 2008 conversation was part of an extended interview with Cooder for the December 9, 2009 issue of Stopsmiling magazine,

3. The Guthrie album was recorded and released in 1940 by RCA Victor. When RCA refused Guthrie’s request to reissue it, Folkways, which had already produced a number of Guthrie albums, rescued Dust Bowl Ballads and brought it out in 1950.

4. Charters and Ann Danberg had not yet married. Dr. Ann Charters went on to her own distinguished career as probably America’s leading, and certainly its pioneering, authority on Jack Kerouac and the literature of the Beat Generation.

5. The record belies Charters’s comment that the whole village was present for that front-porch recording session. One hears a few stray shouts as Spence finishes his guitar intro, but that was it from the peanut gallery. Either Charters edited the crowd noise out, or he misremembered the afternoon’s events. It had been 29 years.

Soon—within a week or so—we’re going to listen to one of America’s greatest folk musicians, gone now, a skinny, banjo-playing fellow of intelligence and insight. Pete Seeger will recall and reflect on Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, and other heroes in the American grain whom Moses Asch (whom Seeger recalls in detail) introduced to the world and whose records he unfailingly kept in stock, whether they sold or not. It’ll be well worth the listen.

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Below: Ry Cooder on Joseph Spence and Folkways Records: