biography
| name: |
Asch, Moses
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| |
known as Moe
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1905–86)
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| biography:
| Record producer, born in Warsaw, Poland. The son of novelist Sholem Asch, he went with his family to the USA (1909) and grew up in Brooklyn, NY. He studied engineering in Koblenz, Germany, and back in the USA one of his first jobs was installing sound equipment in Yiddish theatres. He founded Asch Records (1939) to record his father's stories, but he soon turned to recording folk singers such as Josh White, Burl Ives, and Pete Seeger, and jazz musicians such as Coleman Hawkins and Mary Lou Williams. In 1948 he founded Folkways Records (with Marian Distler) and in addition to recording songs by Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, and a large catalogue of folk, jazz, gospel, children's, and other traditional American music, he enlarged the Folkways catalogue to include folk and traditional music from all over the world. Folkways Records not only provided a service to those specializing in obscure ethnographic music, but introduced blues and folk music which influenced several generations of young Americans. Always open to new ideas, he issued unusual novelty recordings, from the sounds of frogs to electronic music, and also co-founded Oak Publications, a music publishing company. |
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