Moses Asch (1905–1986)

Moses Asch was born to a Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland, the son of famed Yiddish novelist and playwright Sholem Asch and his wife Mathilde Shapiro. His older brother was novelist Nathan Asch. In 1912, the family left Poland because of anti-Semitism, and settled in a suburb of Paris. In 1915, as World War I was raging in France, the family emigrated to New York City. After the war, Moses Asch studied electronics at a technical school in Koblenz, Germany. He returned to New York to work as an audio engineer. In 1938, his father's employer, The Jewish Daily Forward, commissioned the firm that Asch worked for to build a transmitter for WEVD, its Yiddish-language radio station. After this, Asch explored the market for recorded Yiddish music. 1940, he Asch created Asch Recordings, and concentrated on publishing and selling phonograph records. The company went bankrupt in 1948 but Asch was able to rescue his recording career by having his secretary, Marian Distler, register a new company called Folkways Records in her name. Asch ran Folkways from its beginning until his death in 1986. He recorded and published LP records by such famous folk and blues singers as Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, and Pete Seeger. He published American, African, Asian, and European folk music, such as the Religious Folk Music of India, Sounds and Dances of Haiti, Folk Music of Ethiopia, The Old Folksongs of Vermont, and The Folk Music of France. After his death, the Folkways recordings were acquired by the Smithsonian Institution. Anthropologist Michael Asch is his son.