one way to look at it

[mandolirius]

"The real owners of Folkways Records are the people that perform and create what we have recorded and not the people that issue and sell the product."
— Moses Asch

If more people had taken that view, the record industry might not be where it is today.

[JeffD]

Or maybe there just wouldn't be a music industry. I was reading the biography of some OT players during the early recording days and how they had friends who felt they should get more for being recorded, and so they didn't get recorded, and except for mention in a book nobody has ever heard of them.

Its complicated. And lots of folks got taken advantage of. I sometimes wonder if the early recordings were the best musicians, or just the most willing to sign the contract. I am glad, at the end of the day, somebody signed and got recorded.

The big advantage today is the technology makes the gate keepers irrelevant. If you are good, and want to be heard, go for it. Being "discovered" is not as important as it was before.

[KEB]

"The real owners of Folkways Records are the people that perform and create what we have recorded and not the people that issue and sell the product."
— Moses Asch


Moses Asch is one of the great unsung heroes of the 20th century. His Folkways label is a truly visionary thing. I'd highly, highly recommend that anyone interested in roots music, folk musicology, or similar fancy sounding words related to loving music played by people who love music for its own sake, check out the Smithsonian Folkways podcast available here (http://www.folkways.si.edu/explore_folkways/folkways_collection.aspx). The second one is all about Moses and his legacy.

[Mike Bunting]

And since Moses Asch Jr. is at the University of Alberta here in Edmonton, he has moved all the archived material here.

[belbein]

Interesting musings. My mother (an 80 year old classically trained musician who always called folk music "noise") bought a 3 cd set called "Americana." It's pretty interesting. What's most interesting is the number of people I've never heard of, and this is the music I love. What happens to those people? Why do they pass out of our memory? Why do some people become parts of our heritage (Stephen Foster, Jimmy Rogers) and other people just disappear?

And the other thing that's interesting is that when ... oh, I'm forgetting their names, the father and son who recorded all that stuff ... anyway, when they recorded, it was kind of like ocean fishing. They only knew what they caught. It may or may not have been representative. It might have been the best stuff around, or the worst, or completely idiosyncratic. But all they knew is what they hooked up.

So, the one other thing about this that I was thinking today ... I was walking through the park right in the center of Atlanta. All kinds of people hanging out. Not one single person with an instrument. Not one. I wonder if that's a change from olden times, or if it's always been this way.

[KEB]

So, the one other thing about this that I was thinking today ... I was walking through the park right in the center of Atlanta. All kinds of people hanging out. Not one single person with an instrument. Not one. I wonder if that's a change from olden times, or if it's always been this way.

While no one was playing an instrument, I bet that a record number of people were listening to music... every other person has an ipod in their ear 8 hours a day, so they have access to music that isn't performed directly in front of them.

150 years ago (beyond the classical world) there wasn't the same cult of personality that has come to dominate the industry today. Stephen Foster isn't known as a performer, but he was a professional songwriter. He published and promoted his music. Jimmie Rodgers is known because he was a professional performer who took advantage of the birth of recorded music to promote and publish his own music.

True folk music was part of an "aural" tradition, passed on from generation to generation without the kind of modern view of a performer as the center of the performance. It was an individual sharing a tradition dating back hundreds of years. These are songs with no known authors that have been handed down from people's parents and grandparents. The songs that rural Americans were singing and that were recorded by people like John and Alan Lomax were part of that tradition and a lot of the songs that have become bluegrass songs go back to old songs from England, Scotland and Ireland. You'll hear songs like Black Jack Davey (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPFvVqSSnKQ), which is really the same song as Gypsy Laddie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Raggle_Taggle_Gypsy)which is believed to come from the 1700s.

One of the most interesting intersections between popular music and the real folk traditions is in the bluegrass arena where we've appropriated so many traditional songs and added popular ornamentation/instrumentation and come up with this new thing where an individual's performance of traditional songs is "owned" by that individual and very personal, so it kind of falls out of the folk tradition, but it still hearkens back to traditional "Mountain Music."

[allenhopkins]

...oh, I'm forgetting their names, the father and son who recorded all that stuff ... anyway, when they recorded, it was kind of like ocean fishing. They only knew what they caught. It may or may not have been representative. It might have been the best stuff around, or the worst, or completely idiosyncratic. But all they knew is what they hooked up...

John and Alan Lomax, presumably.

[UsuallyPickin]

"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." Hmmmm att.H.S.Thompson