For his capstone project, Clinton Krute demonstrated the ways in which Folkways Records has fulfilled the functions of an institutional ethnographic archives—and by some standards more effectively than those archives—through Moe Asch’s novel business practices, as documented by Olmstead. Founded in 1948 by Moses Asch, Folkways Records not only distributed and popularized a large number of ethnographic recordings over the course of its 70-year existence, it also preserved and documented the cultures of the world and influenced the world of ethnomusicology on a scale that few other private record companies can approach. Though Folkways was decidedly not an institutional archive—at least not until its acquisition by the Smithsonian Institution in 1987— the label adhered to certain standards unheard of in the music industry of the time: including scholarly notes with every release, and maintaining their entire catalog in print regardless of sales. By doing so—and in keeping with its founder’s upbringing among radical leftists and as a member of the Jewish diaspora—Asch hoped to both preserve this material and to provide access for scholars and amateurs, to establish what he called, “a living archive” and an “encyclopedia” of sound.
In the first section of his capstone, Clinton described the story of Moses Asch and the the creation of Folkways, with a focus on the Ethnic Series, drawing attention to the ways in which the label has served the academic community and sought to document, preserve, and make accessible cultural heritage material. In the second section of his capstone, Clinton provided a brief history of field recording and ethnographic sound archives, drawing on the research of the archivists, musicologists, academics, and collectors involved in the creation and operation of these archives. In the third second of his capstone, Clinton provided a detailed overview of contemporary archival description practices for ethnographic audio material, demonstrating the limitations of these practices and showing how Folkways, through its access to commercial markets, offers some potentially fruitful lessons for ethnographic sound archives. And finally, the capstone essay concluded with Clinton highlighting connections between emerging developments in archival description practices and somewhat analogous forms of description and documentation practices of Folkways, particularly the Folkways Ethnic Series. In particular, Clinton focused on two new models—the British Library Sounds’ Archival Sound Recording (ASR) Project and the Association for Cultural Equity’s Global Jukebox—for the archival description and digital repatriation of this material, and emphasize how the story of Folkways might contribute to and supplement these new ways of thinking about archival description and repatriation at institutional sound archives.
Almost alone both in its time and today, this commercial record company (Folkways) operated as an academically and socially influential archive of ethnographic recordings from its first release in 1948 until its acquisition by the Smithsonian Institution in 1987, the moment that marked Folkways’ final transformation from a privately owned company into an institutional sound archive. Folkways Records—and the Ethnic Folkways Library in particular, with its focus on documentation of cultural heritage—uniquely occupied an area somewhere between institutional music archive and commercial record label, a place where ethnomusicological recordings are, as ethnomusicologist Rafael José de Menezes Bastos has written, “made public commodities.” Through his capstone, Clinton demonstrated the ways in which Asch’s project has provided an alternative model for description in sound archives, which, along with the increasing dynamism of digital archival description and distribution, might provide more effective methods and strategies for the long-term preservation, description, and repatriation of archival ethnographic sound recordings.