Smithsonian Folkways

and the Associated Ralph Rinzler

Jeff Place

Abstract Smithsonian Folkways and the associated Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives
and Collections were created in 1988 as a vehicle to collect world music record labels
and disseminate the recordings in a number of ways. In addition to the recordings
of the 50 years of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival which has included participants
from all over the world, the Smithsonian Institution has been collecting the recordings
of independent record companies, 13 to date. This includes Folkways, Arhoolie,
Paredon, Cook, the Mickey Hart World Music Collection and the UNESCO labels.
The plan of collecting record labels allows us to gain all the intellectual property
rights. This assures we can legally distribute the recordings and see that the musicians,
informants, and communities receive their due royalties. The recordings as distributed
as commercial CDs or LPs, streaming audio, or downloads. One can download tracks
through our website or services like Itunes. We have created over 400 new recordings
since 1988 and have over 4000 recordings in our catalog. Our robotic Micro-Tech
machine can create compact discs of the 4000 titles. The roughly 4400 commercial
recordings are about 15% of what exists in the Rinzler Archives. The rest consists of
festival recordings and outtakes from the recording labels. This paper hopes to share
a brief glimpse into our processes.

The parallel founding of Smithsonian Folkways Records and the Folklife Archives
for the then Smithsonian Office of Folklife Programs in 1988 was the beginning an
interesting experiment. It was created as a hybrid archive of world music and sound
and an active record label residing in the national museum of the United States. Prior
to that time the archive had been the materials from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival
(1967-present) and other activities of the Folklife Office. Folkways Records, itself,
had existed as an independent record company in New York City, putting out 2168
albums of the sounds of the twentieth-century.
Ralph Rinzler (1934–1994) had grown up a fan of opera but joined the mass con-
version by many to a fan to folk music which occurred in the United States in the

J. Place (B)
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C., USA
e-mail: PlaceJ1@si.edu

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 121

1950s. He worked as a musician with the Greenbriar Boys in New York recording
for Vanguard Records. While in college at Swarthmore College in Philadelphia he
became very involved with programming of folk music events. He brought that skill
with him to New York. Rinzler, like many, had been influenced by the 1952 Folk-
ways release, Harry Smith’s important The Anthology of American Folk Music. The
Anthology had put back into print 84 important 78 rpm recordings of American folk,
Cajun, blues and gospel music from 1926–1934. It became the repertoire of many
of the 1950s folk musicians in the United States and elsewhere. Rinzler and other
important movers and shavers in the folk revival realized that these recordings were
only 25–30 years old and that many of the musicians were likely still around. They
travelled south and located many, bringing them north of folk festivals. Rinzler had
a key role at the Newport Folk Festival, and during this time, he brought recordings
of his re-discoveries to Folkways Records, the label at the time most likely to issue
them. Through this he established a relationship with Folkways’ owner Moses Asch.
This would prove important later.
Rinzler’s career later took him to the Smithsonian Institution in 1967 as the first
artistic director of the new Festival of American Folklife. He later founded the Smith-
sonian Folklife Program in 1977. By the mid-1980s he had risen to Smithsonian
Assistant Secretary for Public Service. His job was to oversee all of the parts of the
Smithsonian involved in public outreach.
Moses Asch (1905–1986) was the son of novelist Shalom Asch. The family emi-
grated to New York in 1915 from Paris. Asch as a young man became involved in
radio engineering, opening up a shop in New York. Many of customers bemoaned
the fact that they could not purchase ethnic Jewish 78s anywhere in the city. Asch
entered the record business to fill this need, releasing a recording by the Bagelman
Sisters in 1939. One of the famous stories about Asch at that time was that his father
was asked by his friend, the scientist Albert Einstein, if he knew of someone who
had a recording device. Einstein wished to record a message for the Jewish people
in Germany to leave as soon as possible. Sholem Asch mentioned his son and they
travelled to Princeton, New Jersey. At dinner Einstein inquired of the younger Asch,
“Well, Mr. Asch what do you do?”. He replied “I repair radios and install public
address systems but my dream is to create a full encyclopedia of the sounds of the
Earth”. Einstein replied in vigorous support.
Asch followed through first with his Asch and Disc labels and then finally the main
event, his Folkways label, which started on May 1, 1948. Over the course of the next
39 years he created his over 2000 albums. It included folk music by such figures as
Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly and Pete Seeger. It was also strong on children’s music,
spoken word and sound effects, both manmade and natural. At the time of Folkways
founding there were not many record companies who would release ethnographic
field recordings from around the world as well as immigrant groups in the United
States. Starting with his Disc label and continuing with the Ethnic Folkways Library
under editor and anthropologist, Harold Courlander they released hundreds of titles
from around the world. He spent a good deal of time going to academic conventions
and speaking to professors who found Asch to be the place they could go to get their
work published. Asch also felt strongly about including complete liner note booklets
Smithsonian Folkways and the Associated Ralph Rinzler Folklife … 123

with each release. His main customer base was schools, universities and libraries. By
the 1960s Asch had created a full map of the world showing where all his recordings
were made. According to his son, Michael, an anthropologist and former professor
at University of Alberta, it was Moses Asch’s goal to fill in the whole map. He was
always looking for those missing pieces.
In 1986, Moses Asch at Folkways was thinking of retiring. He was slowing down
and was taking offers for his label. Rinzler, who had a fondness for the label, contacted
Asch and the Smithsonian threw its hat into the ring. Initially Asch was hesitant.
He had a long history of working with musicians and writers were affected by the
government harassment and the blacklisting in the 1950s. Having his life’s work
associated with the United States Government made him fear for what effect they
could have on his encyclopedia. He often had released records with very little sales
potential but he felt for a democracy to fully function it need an educated populace,
there was a “need to know”. He even officially called his label, Folkways Records and
Service Corporation. The Smithsonian agreed to Asch’s stipulation that whomever
took over Folkways had to keep every single title available forever even if it sold one
copy every five years. No profit minded company would agree. Rinzler meanwhile
was trying to counter the conservative curators at the Smithsonian who argued that
the national museum had no place collecting sound recordings, the museum was
about objects, science and art. A deal was reached in 1987, between the Asch estate
the Smithsonian and the collection came to the Smithsonian in fall of 1987.
As part of the negotiations, the Smithsonian agreed to fund two positions, one a
curator and director to oversee the continuation of the label and the collection. The
second, an archivist to oversee the archival collection. Chosen as director/curator
was ethnomusicologist Anthony Seeger. I was chosen as archivist. Our goal was
to continue Folkways and it also led to the start another record label, Smithsonian
Folkways to carry on Asch’s life’s work with new projects in the spirit of Folkways.
We also started to acquire other independent record labels similar to Folkways, where
the label’s creator wanted their legacy to endure.
For the almost four decades of Folkways, Asch had operated a small shop. He
did all of the production work and his partner, Marian Distler handled day to day
operations in the office. He worked long hours and managed to issue the equivalent
of a record a week for 40 years. Granted, some of the years of the 1960s saw more
releases than the 1970s or 1980s. Now at the Smithsonian, the label had to work
in a giant bureaucracy-forms and extended periods to get paperwork through. In
the early years, Anthony Seeger was able to get much done through having our
record distributors handle much of the business and production. Eventually all was
brought into the Smithsonian office. Even with these ongoing difficulties Smithsonian
Folkways has been able to release 400 recordings over 30 years, not quite up to Moses
Asch’s pace,
The archive was set up as a partner to the label. There is an issue with running
a business with U.S. federal funds, even if the label is non-profit, which it is. The
Smithsonian has what it calls “trust funds”. This is based on endowments starting
with $500,000 given to the institution in 1835 by the estate of James Smithson
to found under the name of the Smithsonian Institution an establishment “for the
124 J. Place

increase and diffusion of knowledge among men”. All of the activities of Smithsonian
Folkways are run with trust funds, philanthropic gifts, grants, or proceeds of the sale
of recordings. The archive is a different matter, support for the archive is federally
funded, it a federally owned collection. This supports staff and the maintenance of
the collection.
The collection, itself, is the paper files of Folkways, the production files and album
layout materials, and the audio recordings, masters and outtakes. During the 1990s,
work was done with a small staff to catalog, identify, and to migrate many of the
recordings to a more stable form. Unfortunately, some of the sound was copied to
digital audio tapes so needed to be redone. The collection has 5000 instantaneous
discs, some of which are ethnographic field recordings, some are important record-
ings made on glass acetates in Moses Asch’s studio. There are about 10,000 open
reel tapes, the earliest are Fred Ramsey’s recordings of the singer Lead Belly in 1948.
About half are masters for the over 2000 albums. The other half are out takes, the full
set of field tapes or duplicate safety copies. Extensive inventories of these recordings
have been done, identifying content on unmarked or poorly labelled recordings. Pre-
serving them for the future is an important goal, but more importantly the mission
of the archive, as with Smithsonian Folkways, has been outreach, to see them used
and made available to the public in a myriad of ways. Many of the 400 recordings
released by Smithsonian Folkways since 1988 have come from the archive, including
many unreleased recordings discovered during the cataloging and transfer process.
Meanwhile starting in 1988, decisions were being made as to what we should pub-
lish in the new compact disc era. Anthony Seeger had a group of ethnomusicologists
in various specialties access the quality of the recordings previously issued on Folk-
ways. Certain historically important works were identified. He prioritized recordings
where the traditions had either ceased to be performed or had changed dramatically.
He felt if the tradition still was much like before it was better to document it now
using better equipment. Recordings like John Cohen’s Peruvian recordings or Colin
Turnbull’s Ituri Pygmy recordings joined the compact disc era,
We started actively seeking other extinct or soon to be record companies. The
second collection what that of recording engineer Emory Cook. The Cook or Cook
Labs label was active in the 1950s and 1960s. Cook was an inventor of high end
audio equipment and state of the art production processes at the time. His records
were prized by individuals with state of the art audio gear for their stellar fidelity.
Cook approached us in 1990 about whether we wished to acquire his label. We don’t
have an acquisitions budget to buy labels, so this started our policy of having the
collection appraised so the donor can get a tax deduction, have it a straight donation,
or to find a philanthropist to help fund the acquisition.
In subsequent years, we have acquired other labels. Why labels? It goes to a core
philosophy of what we do. Acquiring the label and business papers allows us to
acquire the intellectual property rights and contracts to the material. We can then use
them freely for our publications, license them to third parties, create new versions
or unreleased projects. Very importantly having the contracts allows us to pay the
creators for their work. In the case of those creators we can not locate we devote a
good amount of time trying to find them. This often means spending hours and hours
Smithsonian Folkways and the Associated Ralph Rinzler Folklife … 125

of staff time to find someone to mail a twenty dollar check. In some cases, we have
arranged to send the money to a common fund within a community
We are often approached by individuals wishing to donate collections. In many
cases, and it was common practice when the recordings were made, the donor has no
identification of any of the musicians on the recordings. The royalty recipient was
thought to be the collector or archive. For us to ethically publish them we would
need to track down the original musicians or estates which makes it untenable.
After the Cook Records acquisition we have subsequently acquired others. In
1990, we acquired Paredon Records from Barbara Dane and Irwin Silber, a label
of music from political movements worldwide. We acquired singer Richard Dyer-
Bennet’s label. Fast Folk Records was a singer-songwriter collective in New York
which put out over 100 titles of emerging singer-songwriters. Monitor Records,
founded by Rose Rubin and Michael Stillman, of music from around the world,
including strengths in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Others were
Collector Records (trade union songs from the U.S. and U.K.), MORE Records
(mariachi music of New Mexico); BRI Records (Appalachian music from Virginia);
The London Library of Recorded English (spoken word of British literature); the
recordings of world music made by and issued by Grateful Dead percussionist Mickey
Hart.
Important recent acquisitions are the UNESCO record label. These recordings
had been issued in various ways over the years most recently by the Audivis label. It
includes about 150 titles, including ones that not been issued that we subsequently
have issued. We also acquired the Arhoolie label, run by Chris Strachwitz from
1960–2016. Arhoolie includes approximately 500 titles of American and Mexi-
can vernacular music including norteno, mariachi, zydeco, blues, Cajun, and gospel
music. It also includes the recordings by the Ideal, Falcon and Discos Smith labels.
Arhoolie also released anthologies of older 78 recordings from around the world.
Each one of these collections can include the papers of the founders, the labels
masters and outtakes. Also, it could commercial records or books that were the
property of the former owner, that are added to our reference library. These are
not distributed by us, just library researchers can use. We have also acquired other
recordings by recordists where these are the remaining recordings that complement
issued titles on our distributed labels. Examples of this would be the recordings of
Charles Bogert and Arthur Greenhall (animal sounds) and musical recordings by
Verna Gillis, Ralph Rinzler, Eric Davidson, Tom Wisner and Frederic Ramsey Jr.
In the early 1990s, we received a grant from the Ford Foundation to create Smith-
sonian Global Sound. The idea was to create a portal and an audio “union catalog”
of recordings from ethnomusicology archives around the world in every country. It
would be “one stop shopping” for researchers in world music and a resource for
teachers (Fig. 1). ARCE (India) and ILAM (South Africa) joined in. There were
discussions with others but the idea did not take off. There has been discussion about
reviving it (Fig. 2).
The archive continues to look for other record company collections, looking to fill
in gaps and to be able to tell a wider story. It also houses the materials created by our
larger office the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. The main
126 J. Place

Fig. 1 The Microtech

collection here is the materials of the 50 years of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival.
Each year an average of two or three themes are chosen. These can be countries, an
U.S. state, a region, or a theme based on occupational folklore. A typical year might

Fig. 2 Archive staff using

be 2003 where we featured Mali, Scotland and Appalachia. 2002 was one program
tracing the Silk Road from Japan to Italy. 2017 is Armenia and Catalonia. Frequently
fieldwork is done before hand with audio recordings of oral history and music. In
keeping with desire to own the rights for use we get releases signed for non-profit
educational and museum use, allowing use.
All in all, these are the holdings of what is now called the Ralph Rinzler Folklife
Archives and Collections, named after the founder of the office. The archive’s goal is
to manage and protect these collections and make them useable and available for the
Center and Smithsonian Folkways. The collection is used to create on-line education
plans. Frequently teachers will add their plans to the Smithsonian Folkways website.
The 50,000 tracks in our collection where we own full commercial rights are
available through Smithsonian Folkways. They can be acquired by purchase on on-
demand compact disc (or commercial jewel box CDs in the case of some). The
on-demand CDs is truly a DIY (Distribute it yourself) system. We have two Micro-
tech robotic system which can make copies for the asker. Once someone orders one,
a message is sent to the robot, it copies the audio from a server to the disc, it also
copies a.pdf of the liner note booklet to the disc. A sticker which is a copy of the
original album jacket is printed out and affixed to a cardboard generic CD sleeve. It
resembles a small LP. They can be shrink wrapped to sell in stores who wish them.
Some titles are being reissued on vinyl while the demand remains.
The record business is recent years has seen the sales of physical recordings
plummet. For a label/collection that has a goal to get our recordings and the story
behind them out a new direction must be looked for. For much of popular music,
a simple artist name and title might be adequate as what appears on the playback
device. For us, the liner notes are crucial. If I look at my phone and it tells me the
stream I just downloaded is “Deer Dance” but tells me nothing about which tribe, or
how does it fit in their culture, that is not fulfilling our mission. All of the liner notes
to all 4000 titles can be downloaded free from the Smithsonian Folkways website.
Streaming is the way people are listening to music in the digital age and a stream
pays a fraction of a cent to the creator. That is not sufficient to support an artists or
a record company. We have had 250 million streams but the money coming in does
not make up for what was lost of physical sales.
We have out materials on Itunes and other services but downloads are no longer
selling like they were. We are looking for other ways. We are non-profit but need to
break even. We have a service called Alexander Street Press through which schools,
libraries and universities can subscribe to our entire catalog and students can have
full access on campus. Our website takes certain parts of the collection and posts
features online, some through our on-line Smithsonian Folkways Magazine. Outside
scholars are used to create articles about their specialties.
As compact disc sales drop, box sets have held on so going the direction of a full
box with recordings make sense, it fits our mission. Staff and fans create playlists we
can post on-line and through social media. We have started a membership program,
much like public television, which allows members access to our catalog and inside
access to the staff and label. It is a different business model which will be necessary.
128 J. Place

Back on the archival side changes are also happening. The titles available through
Smithsonian Folkways make up only 15% of the recordings in the archive. What
of all the historical papers and manuscripts? The paper files and media are being
digitized through in-house Smithsonian grant funds. We also did receive a large
outside grant called Saving America’s Treasures for audio digitization. The paper
materials and photographs are being scanned and imbedded metadata added. For
audio we have been digitizing the recordings at 96 K, 24bit rates using the Wave Lab
software. We are using BWF Metaedit to embed metadata in the audio files. For all of
the digitized assets, they are being stored in the Smithsonian’s Artesia Digital Asset
Management System. The goal of the DAMS is to store assets but also to connect
with on-line Smithsonian sites including the SOVA Smithsonian Collections search
function. Assets can be made available to listen or view through this site depending
on intellectual property rights or sensitivities with the creator or copyright. Certainly,
the parts of the archive commercially available will not be posted free. Hopefully
having the materials available on-line will allow researchers to help us with metadata
on recordings where not all not all the metadata is known. The original recording,
usually analog, will be maintained for future use if needed. We have witnessed three
generations of “best practices” for migrating the sound over the last 30 years. There
is no doubt there will be a fourth or fifth.
We hope we can raise funds in order to make all our commercial recordings ulti-
mately available free to students all over the world through teachers. Making these
materials and the many recordings in the archive, where we can, available on-line
is exactly what we do and should do. It is using the label and on-line Smithsonian
channels to get the content of our collections out there where individuals all over
the world can use and learn from them. It is using the partnership between an inter-
nationally known non-profit record company and the wonderful collections in our
archives to maximize their use to the best of our abilities for the people who seek to
use them.