The Folkways Collection

Greenwich Village in the late 1950s and early 1960s--the time and place has taken on the flavor of legend. This second of two programs focusing on the era looks at Folkways Records' documentation of the burgeoning folk music revival and the New York coffee house scene which led to the birth of the singer-songwriter genre.

For a time, Phil Ochs was considered Bob Dylan's greatest rival for the crown atop the politicized folk music movement of the 1960s. His life ended in tragedy; his downward spiral as an individual and as an artist coinciding with the increasingly confused and cynical mood of America in the late 60s and early 70s. This program examines the legacy of this great singer-songwriter.

This final program in the series revisits some of the great music and oral tradition of the Folkways collection and incorporates interviews with a variety of artists, biographers and music historians to place the Folkways collection in its proper historical context--at least as clearly as can be determined just fifty years after the Folkways label was born.

The phenomenal diversity of the Folkways collection becomes immediately apparent when one examines the field recordings of ethnic music which Moses Asch collected from around the world. In many respects, this body of work set the stage for the explosion of so-called 'world beat' and 'world fusion' music in the 1990's. This is the first of two programs dedicated to this subject, incorporating both original recordings from Folkways and modern examples of world music hybrids.