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| An interview with `An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels' Author Josh MacPhee |
In the handbook that Harry Smith edited, which was included in the Folkways label's 1952-released Anthology of American Folk Music, Harry Smith provided listeners with "information on issues," "notes on recordings" and "discographical references", for each of the 87 folk song tracks he included in his anthology. In what ways do you think An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels might be considered similar to or different from the American Folk Music handbook which was included in Folkways's classic Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music mid-20th-century release?
JOSH MACPHEE: While I think my intentions follow in Smith's footsteps, my process is really different. I rarely focus on individual songs, and instead have used the record label as a way to try to peel back and look at the political context in which music is recorded and released into the world. Through looking at the origins and motivations of specific labels, their catalogs, and also how they operated, we can learn a lot about how music was connected (or not) to social movements and larger events in the world.
In addition, Smith's project was produced at the very advent of the vinyl record, while mine is about the parallel arcs of vinyl production and international political movements through the second half of the twentieth century. The U.S. Civil Rights Movement rises to prominence in the late 1950s just as the vinyl record becomes the dominant form for music distribution—and uses vinyl to great agit prop effect—through the use of recorded music during the anti-apartheid movement in Southern Africa at the close of the century and end of vinyl's dominance.
Prior to Moe Asch's Folkways label producing and releasing its Anthology of American Folk Music records in 1952, Harry Smith apparently had personally collected thousands of 78 rpm recordings before selling around half of them to Moe Asch (for 35 cents per disc) and half of his collection to the NY Public Library (where the records were later apparently stored in the stacks of its Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center, on the Upper West Side). Before writing the third edition of An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels, did you collect many of the vinyl records, yourself, of the labels your encyclopedia mentions? And, if so, how were you able to find out about and locate the vinyl records produced by the labels you reference in An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels?
JOSH MACPHEE: Absolutely. I spent a number of years collecting political records, and still do so.
Initial forays into record collecting were directed by friends and political acquaintances and happened at local record shops, but quickly jumped to online searches, and the Discogs website in particular. Discogs is an interesting and unique resource, sort like if you bred Wikipedia and eBay, merging the database of the former with the decentralized sales platform of the latter.
Once I started to get a sense of what was out there, I would reach out to record sellers in other parts of the world, let them know I was really interested in political records, and because many of these are not in high demand, they would sell me large collections of them relatively cheaply. At this point, I've amassed over 2,000 explicitly political records, released by about half as many labels and organizations, from at least two dozen countries and every continent (except Antarctica).
Around ten years ago (to obtain some money to purchase a new cheap acoustic guitar), I sold the vinyl albums I had collected from the post-1950's era of U.S. folk music history to some stores that sold used vinyl records to their customers. And, ironically, I found that the used vinyl record store merchants were more interested in purchasing and paying more money for the used vinyl records produced by Paredon and some of the other labels described in your encyclopedia, than they were in purchasing and paying money for the used vinyl records that had originally been purchased by many more music fans after the 1950's. Do you think there's a possibility that some of the vinyl records produced by some of the labels you describe (that received less U.S. distribution network access or corporate radio, foundation-sponsored radio or state-funded radio airplay, generally, in the USA than what the vinyl records produced by the music industry subsidiaries of the U.S. and UK corporate media conglomerates received) are now considered more valuable by collectors these days?
JOSH MACPHEE: "Value" is a strange thing in our society, especially when being defined by collectors. Often the more rare something is, the more valuable it us seen to be, regardless of its actually impact on the world. For instance, early pressings of popular records with misprints on the covers regularly are sold for a lot more than more common versions, even though the music is identical.
Paredon records that were produced in smaller numbers, or for some reason are harder to find, are definitely more expensive than ones that might have been much more popular when they were released. For instance, an album Paredon released by political Thai band Caravan is almost impossible to find and sells for $500-$1000 to U.S. collectors, while records by Bernice Reagon released around the same time sell for $5 or less.
Reagon was a central musical figure in the Civil Rights Movement as a member of the Freedom Singers and went on to form the immensely popular Sweet Honey in the Rock, and undoubtedly made a much more important impact on the U.S. and music more broadly than Caravan--who are great, but pretty marginal outside of Thailand. (end of part 1. To be continued).
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