Week of December 1, 2005, Issue #528
ARTS
Got you covered
By AGNIESZKA MATEJKO
It’s hard to imagine that Edmonton, of all places, could be the frequent
destination of a famous New Yorker who changed the course of music in North
America and who grew to love our city so much that he donated his life’s
work to it. But that’s exactly what happened. Moses Asch, the founder
and director of Folkways Records (the company responsible for bringing artists
like Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly and Pete Seeger to the world’s attention)
rarely left New York, but when he did, he would come to Edmonton to visit his
son and grandchildren. Asch grew to be so impressed with the quality and diversity
of local artists and with the culture-friendly atmosphere of local festivals
and radio stations such as CKUA (a station he felt represented many of his own
values), that despite all the museums vying for his historic record collection,
he chose Edmonton as the best place to house his legacy. Now, Asch’s massive
collection is permanently available for public listening in the U of A’s
newly formed FolkwaysAlive: Canadian Centre for Ethno Musicology. And the album
covers, in a collaboration between the U of A’s Department of Art and
Design, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and FolkwaysAlive, have been temporarily
installed for viewing at the FAB Gallery’s show Seeing the World of Sound:
the Cover Art of Folkways Records.
These hard-hitting, deeply socially conscious album covers became the trademark
of Asch’s influential company. “This is something that has huge
social relevance,” explains co-curator Joan Greer as she looks at the
hundreds of albums that she helped to select and hang in the FAB Gallery. “Folkways
gave voice to so many different kinds of people—people who didn’t
have a voice.”
Regula Qureshi, another curator and the director of FolkwaysAlive, agrees. “It
was a small company but it was so important because it stood for making the
world a better place.”
The deep reverence with which Greer and Qureshi speak about the legacy of Moses
Asch is understandable. The artists that Folkways Records supported over many
decades of turbulent American history were anything but mainstream. In the middle
of the Vietnam War, Asch produced a record of Vietnamese music, which, says
Greer, not only gave people a face, but also showed that they literally had
a voice. He produced an album by Pete Seeger while he was on trial during the
McCarthy hearings, and long before the gay rights movement, he put out an album
called Gay and Straight Together. He also turned convention on its head by getting
Leadbelly, a black man just out of prison for murder, to record an album for
kids called Negro Folk Songs for Young People Sung by Leadbelly. And this list
goes on to count over two thousand albums.
But as this display of album covers aptly shows, the voices of marginalized
musicians were not Asch’s only means of changing the world; the visual
artwork became a powerful message in itself. Folkways Records covers radically
stood out in a sea of slick mainstream designs; their matte, sombre palettes
and a graphic style with somewhat of a hand-made, woodcut look was instantly
recognizable. “When the sound, the artists, the visuals, were put together,
it formed a powerful mix,” Greer says.
In the end, one tiny company (Asch never hired more than six people at one time)
helped to lift the music in North America to a socially conscious platform.
“He’s all about human rights,” Qureshi says. “He didn’t
go about saying it; he did it.” V
Seeing the World of Sound: the Cover Art of Folkways Records
Curated by Joan Greer, Regula Qureshi, Margaret Asch, Susan Colberg, Daniel
Sheehy and Anthony Seeger • FAB Gallery (U of A)• To Dec 17