Many of the earliest field recordings of non-European music were made not by musicologists, but by scouts from British and German record companies. Having sold gramophones to well-heeled Third World listeners, they wanted to sell records of their local music to be played on them. Today these records are precious evidence of music which has since been lost, but their original purpose was commercial. Yet record producers have perennially been fired by the romance of capturing music before it dies, and the list of labels dedicated to ethnography is long. Those dealt with here reflect the variety of ways in which such companies can emerge, whether in response to politics, to changing public taste, to personal crusades, or simply by accident.

‘I thought I had a large concept of documentation,’ wrote the American song collector Samuel Charters, ‘but in Moses Asch I met a man whose concept was large enough to contain mine and all the others.’ Asch himself recalled telling Albert Einstein about his intention to found the company which became Folkways Records, and getting an emphatic thumbs-up from the great physicist. Asch’s vision was of a record company which could ‘describe the human race, the sound it makes, what it creates’.

Son of the politically radical Yiddish novelist Sholem Asch, Moses Asch was born in Warsaw in 1905. Anti-Semitism drove the family to Paris, and when France was engulfed by war in 1915 they migrated to the Bronx where Leon Trotsky, a friend of Sholem’s, lived next door. Moses was fascinated by sound electronics, and went into business as a designer of public address systems, but when the socialist Jewish Daily Forward newspaper commissioned him to create a transmitter for its Yiddish-language radio station, he discovered a market for Yiddish music, and began to produce records for it.

He also recorded Lead Belly, which led to recording relationships with left-leaning singers including Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger, and with jazz musicians like Mary Lou Williams, Art Tatum, and Coleman Hawkins. Over-extending his operation, he went bankrupt; he resurrected his business as a new company, Folkways Records, registered in his secretary Marian Distler’s name, but with himself designated as ‘consultant’; he ran the company from its formation until his death in 1986, notching up two thousand titles.