MAKING PEOPLE’S MUSIC:
Moe Asch and Folkways Records
By Peter D. Goldsmith
Smithsonian Institution Press, 468 pages, $34.95
LAND OF A THOUSAND DANCES:
Chicano Rock ‘n’ Roll From
Southern California
By David Reyes and Tom Waldman
University of New Mexico Press, 178 pages, $50 cloth, $18.95 paper
Decades after their deaths and nearly half a century since either singer stepped in front of a microphone, Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly remain folk-music legends. Folkways Records founder Moses “Moe” Asch, who died in 1986, is far less well-known. But the efforts of Asch, like those of folklorists John and Alan Lomax, ensured that the work of Guthrie, Leadbelly and countless other artists would live on in an astonishingly wide-ranging collection of recordings that broadened the boundaries of folk and introduced world music long before multiculturalism became modish.
From 1948, the year he founded Folkways, to his death nearly 40 years later, Asch built a catalog of nearly 2,200 recordings. Though best known for documenting indigenous folk and blues traditions, the label also was home to jazz, children’s songs, spoken word and music from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Caribbean. Driven by a desire to preserve the music in perpetuity, Asch was negotiating with the Smithsonian Institution to acquire the Folkways catalog at the time of his death; the deal went through posthumously.
The fact that the museum’s Smithsonian Folkways label is now home to the collection might seem to make the Smithsonian Institution Press a less-than-impartial publisher where Asch is concerned, but biographer Peter D. Goldsmith can’t be faulted for lack of objectivity in this meticulously researched account of the man, the music and the social forces that shaped both. Written with the cooperation of Asch’s son, Michael–who, Goldsmith notes, was forced “to confront painful aspects of his father’s life” in the process–“Making People’s Music” depicts Asch as a complex, contradictory and temperamental man who possessed and implemented a remarkable aesthetic vision but also could be financially unreliable and emotionally unavailable.
A union sympathizer who prided himself on supporting the arts, Asch treated his own recording artists shabbily, moving at a glacial pace when it came to writing royalty checks. An indifferent parent, he began an extramarital affair with his secretary, Marian Distler, around the time Michael was born, Goldsmith writes; the affair, which Asch seldom bothered to conceal, ended only with Distler’s suicide 20 years later.
But as Goldsmith notes, at least young Michael had his mother’s attention. Asch, who was born in 1905 in Warsaw and immigrated to New York City with his family as a child, grew up with little parental nurturing. His father, widely read Yiddish novelist Sholem Asch, was immersed in literary pursuits and spent little time with his offspring. His mother, Matilda, apparently recognizing a need to choose between her children and her egocentric, dictatorial husband, chose the latter; Moe and his siblings often were left with relatives while the elder Asches traveled to promote Sholem’s career.
“Without indulging unreasonably in psychological portraiture,” Goldsmith argues, “we can see Moe Asch’s life as a struggle to come to terms with his parents’ neglect and to create a body of work that his father would find worthy.”
Like Robert Zimmerman, who reinvented himself as Bob Dylan (and recorded for Folkways during the folk revival of the early 1960s as Blind Boy Grunt), Asch had a carefully constructed vision of how he wished to present himself and his past. Though the stories he told interviewers remained consistent over the years, they were not the most revealing window through which to view Asch, contends Goldsmith, an anthropologist who sees his subject as a man “positioned at a singular crossroad in American history, in the history of the American Left and American Jewry, and in the history of musical and scholarly tastes . . . a cultural `broker,’ who although neither attached to nor invested in a single cultural position, dedicated himself to the process by which others mediated understandings across cultural boundaries.”
While two musical movements of the ’60s that Folkways showcased–the folk revival and civil rights/protest songs–were garnering mainstream media attention, a burgeoning musical development in Southern California was going largely unreported. Even today, David Reyes and Tom Waldman argue in “Land of a Thousand Dances,” Chicano rock tends to be overlooked and underappreciated by rock historians and music journalists whose familiarity with the genre too often extends only to Los Lobos and ’50s star Ritchie Valens (born Valenzuela).
Unabashed cheerleaders for Mexican-American pop, Reyes and Waldman occasionally let their exuberance run away with them–claiming, for example, that the extended jam “may have been a Chicano invention” and that Chicano audiences are far less race conscious than their Caucasian or African-American counterparts. But “Dances,” which takes its title from the ’60s pop hit by Chicano quartet Cannibal and the Headhunters, is not intended to be a scholarly treatise on the genre. Rather, it succeeds as a lively and informative anecdotal history of a vibrant sound and the social and cultural scene that surrounded it.
Valens, the authors note, was hardly the first Chicano to play rock ‘n’ roll. By the time the hit singles “Donna” and “La Bamba” catapulted him to stardom in late 1958, Mexican-American artists such as the Armenta Brothers, the Rhythm Rockers and Bobby Rey (bandleader for the Hollywood Argyles, who had a No. 1 hit in 1960 with “Alley-Oop”) had been performing or recording for several years. Their stories are told here along with those of dozens of other artists, including Frankie “Cannibal” Garcia and the Headhunters, who honed their act in the housing projects of East Los Angeles and went on to open for the Beatles on one leg of the British quartet’s 1965 American tour.
“Only once during the tour was a Headhunter actually made to feel like he was in the presence of superstars,” the authors write of the band’s experiences with the Beatles. “On a plane flight, (Headhunter Joe Jaramillo) walked to the back and tried to enter an intense poker game involving Ringo, Paul, John, George and Brian Epstein. He was going to take these rich foreigners for everything they had. `I had one hundred dollars,’ said Joe. `I thought I was bad. But they were playing for a thousand a hand.’ Brian politely told him to return to his seat.”
