Weekend self-care open thread: Moses Asch and the recording of Black folk music
This past week, musical luminary Clive Davis passed away. He has long been lauded as a champion of Black music. However, the legacy, as usual, is far more complex:
A 1972 Harvard Report, commissioned by Clive Davis for CBS, outlined a strategy for white-owned corporations to enter and financially exploit the booming Black music market, which was then dominated by independent labels. pic.twitter.com/6bmDmmPgDI
— Dirty Laundry Media 🇺🇸 (@Billtheicon) June 23, 2026
In the late 1960s and early ’70s, much of the blackest music on the airwaves worldwide came directly from the Black-owned record labels Motown and Stax. Largely clueless about how to rake in more dollars from Black audiences, Clive Davis—president of Columbia Records in 1972—commissioned a report from Harvard Business School entitled “A Study of the Soul Music Environment.” Although the whitepaper led to the creation of Black music divisions at Columbia and elsewhere, including the widespread hiring of Black record execs, the report was also seen as a sort of sinister corporate playbook for pimping African American culture for profit, and Davis was responsible.
But you know who didn't make a fortune off of Black music? Moses Asch.
In a Declaration of Purpose, Moe stated: “My obligation is to see that Folkways remains a depository of the sounds and music of the world and that these remain available to all. The real owners of Folkways Records are the people that perform and create what we have recorded and not the people that issue and sell the product. The obligation of the company is to maintain the office, the warehouse, the billing and collection of funds, to pay the rent and telephone, etc. Folkways succeeds when it becomes the invisible conduit from the world to the ears of human beings.”
Asch, who came to the US from Poland, and was the son of Yiddish author Sholem Asch, sought to preserve music which would otherwise have perished. And much of this music was Black music, from Leadbelly to Ella Jenkins. He is an exemplar of the Black-Jewish alliance which is so under threat from our current politics, as many sectors seek to upend that alliance which has engendered much of the cultural and political progress we have achieved over the past six decades.
This weekend we will honor this man, and the music which he championed.
A lot of times, it just takes a person with a vision who doesn't give a fuck about the dominant cultural morés to change his part of the world.
As always, dear friends, be ever kind, gentle, and joyful to yourselves and those around you.