Dean Goldsmith's Little Book

By Bradford Stanley | Monday, August 31, 1998

My ex-girlfriend used to say that big things come from small packages. The reader of diminutive freshman Dean Peter D. Goldsmith's new book, Making People's Music: Moe Asch and Folkway Records, finds out, as my girlfriend quickly did, that this is not necessarily the case.

Our tiny dean has taken a potentially interesting topic and made it mind-bendingly dull. Asch led a very eventful life, encountering many of the luminaries of the twentieth century.

He interviewed Albert Einstein and built the first AC/DC amplifier for the Gibson guitar company (He also claimed to have strung the first Les Paul guitar). He recorded with poet Langston Hughes as well as Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and Pete Seeger. He was the director of Folkways Records for almost forty years and over that timespan, he compiled a catalog of almost 2,200 recordings. His dedication to obtaining authentic folk music greatly expanded America's musical consciousness.

However, Goldsmith takes Asch's interesting life and dulls it down for the reader's consumption. The book begins when Goldsmith falls prey to one of the most obnoxious trends in biographies.

It takes nearly thirty pages before Goldsmith mentions the birth of Moe Asch. He starts off by commenting on Jewish life in Polish villages, socialist Zionism of the late nineteenth century, worker demonstrations of St. Petersburg and other such boring tales.

Goldsmith then details Asch's childhood in irrelevent minutia. Moe flew kites in his garden! His best grade in ninth grade was in drawing! Moe's family receives the same extensive treatment. His father attended a Yiddish language conference!

Goldsmith obviously did exhaustive research for this book. He conducted many interviews, beginning in 1990, and he has 33 pages of endnotes. However, more detail does not make the book more interesting. Perhaps Goldsmith intended to include a lot of facts to give a sense of immediacy to the reader, but his thoroughness instead lends to the work only confusion and frustration.

Goldsmith also has trouble keeping his train of thought.

He often alternates between describing events that occur to Moe or his family and peripheral events that have little or nothing to do with the topic at hand.

In a journalistic coup, he shockingly uncovers that Moe's younger brother John has bad eyesight but just a few sentences later he points out that at the convention of the Russian Social Democracy, most Bundists supported the Mensheviks. Does anyone care? It is difficult to find instances in this book when Goldsmith actually talks about Moe Asch for more than a few paragraphs without interruption.

Goldsmith plods through Asch's childhood and then focuses too long on Asch's early career. Asch was trained to be a radio engineer at a technical school in Germany. It was at this school where Asch first developed his love for folk music and his desire to catalog America's folk culture.

After graduating, Asch manufactured navigational devices for bootleggers, did work for Gibson, and fell into the clutches of socialist politics, whose grasp he would never truly escape. He built the transmitter for WEVD, a New York radio station whose call letters were the initials of Eugene V. Debs.

Although some of the stories Goldsmith provides, such as Asch's encounter with great entrepreneur David Sarnoff, are interesting, most of the stories just waste space that could be used to talk about the interesting part of Asch's life, his recording career.

When Asch's radio company folded, he retained its recording studio. From here, he based his future operations. He founded two failed record companies, inspirationally titled Asch Records and Disc Records, before finally hitting on Folkways Records.

His plan at all of these companies was to occupy niches that the major record companies were avoiding. As a result, he pioneered recording music from Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe. He also recorded folk music, whose audience consisted mainly of urban socialists. The great number of American socialists listening to folk music gave communists the impression that folk music was capable of uniting the proletariat.

In the 1930s, communists tried to use folk music to convert the masses to the red army. They lined up politically committed artists such as Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie and got these artists to try their hardest to convert America. Woody Guthrie wrote one song in which he tried to transform Jesus Christ into a subversive. Langston Hughes waxed eloquently about the USSR in a poem entitled 'Lenin.'

However, the communists did not know one important fact. At the time, almost no one other than urban socialists liked folk music. Despite this trend, Asch stayed away from formal political ties, though his radical sympathies were well known.

Then the McCarthy era came and folk music dropped its political overtones. Asch kept plugging along and picked up many more recordings from various countries, as well as more folk music found in the United States.

Asch weathered the lack of popular interest of folk music in the 1950s and saw it rise again in popularity in the early sixties.

At that point, many of his artists, such as Pete Seeger, left him to go to major labels.

Embittered by this trend, Asch again branched into niche markets that no one else wanted.

He recorded important songs of the civil rights movement. In addition, he branched out again into recording radical political songs.

One of his favorite groups was the Village Fugs, a group of self-described 'hippie poets.' These drugged-out wonders recorded such masterpieces as 'Boobs a Lot' and 'Kill for Peace.'

For Asch, 'authenticity' was a more important quality than quality itself. This stretch of aesthetic principles in search of the authentic led one High Fidelity writer to 'define torture as being locked in a room for twenty-four hours while being forced to listen nonstop to Folkways recordings.'

The same could be said of Goldsmith's book. Goldsmith addresses a very interesting topic, but his manic writing style makes it impossible to get involved in the book. Goldsmith starts to write about Asch's life but then loses his own narrative, caught up in his impulse to deconstruct the racist tactics of Bull Connor or the inflation of 1920s Germany.

If he would stick to the topic at hand, the life of Moe Asch, and not use his subject as a window to irrelevent rumination, his book would work out well. Unfortunately, he cannot or does not do this.

In short (no offense, Dean Goldsmith), this is a book which had great potential. Asch lived a very exciting and important life. Goldsmith picked an interesting topic and did exhaustive research. But, his book ends up just being aggressively boring.

Dean Goldsmith's Little Book

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