How Barbara Dane and Irwin Silber Created Paredon Records

 

In a 1991 interview, 20th-century and 21st-century U.S. jazz, blues and folk singer Barbara Dane recalled how she and former Sing-Out! magazine editor Irwin Silber were able to create the non-commercially-motivated Paredon Records protest folk music recording label:

"Paredon Records, you know, basically came out of the fact that we saw the need, we saw the fact all these singers existed and nobody knew about each other...So I got the idea we gotta have a record label. And I talked to Irwin about it, and Irwin had had a lot of experience with Folkways...And we were actually perfectly suited team of people...

"...So then the question is how do you get the money to do it. So I was just bending everybody’s ear...A couple years go by. I’m telling everybody this great vision I have...

"And finally a friend of ours, who was also someone who had lived in Cuba for a while and was very sympathetic to the politics of it and everything, brought a millionaire friend of hers over to meet us. And he wants to be anonymous so we’re still not gonna give out his name.

"But he thought this was a great idea and decided he would give us, you know, one stock dividend to play around with....Actually, it was supposed to be an interest free loan, but he never came around to formalize any agreement or collect anything on the loan. And he said don’t contact me; I’ll contact you. And he never contacted us again. And so that’s the end of that.

"So we were actually capitalized. I’ll tell you what we were capitalized at. He gave us 17,000 dollars. Which is about enough to put out half of one record, you know, really. And so we just socked it in the bank and started doing it.

"And the concept we had was that we won’t take any salaries or any overhead. We did it out of the living room or the backroom. I had an extra bedroom just then. I did it out of that room or the kitchen table and Irwin did it out of his little home office.

"And...you know, you go rent studios. Nobody buys a studio. Record labels don’t own studios. That’s a different business. And all the other services could be contracted out...that needed to be done to manufacture something.

"So we didn’t have any overhead. It was no overhead involved except maybe some telephone calls and stationary and, you know, the cost of renting a studio or whatever. And all of the things that were involved with producing it....

"I got to be very good at convincing people to write me an essay....You know, `Okay, you’re expert on this. On what’s going on Ecuador. So write me brief little history of Ecuador today.'

"And getting things like that out of people on a volunteer basis. And when we had to pay, we paid.

"But the thing is the object was to not pay out anymore of this budget. So then whatever income came in, and whatever the budget had to use some combination, you go ahead and make more. So you keep reinvesting it. Each record pays for the next one. Basically that’s the way it is…."

U.S. Jazz, Blues, Protest Folk Singer and Paredon Records Co-Founder Barbara Dane

And in a 1991 interview, [the now-deceased] former Sing-Out! magazine editor Irwin Silber also noted:

"I felt that doing this record label was an opportunity to use skills that I had developed over the years in a way that probably, at that time, were not going to be utilized by anybody else...

"Early in the fifties, I actually started a little record label on behalf of People’s Artists called Hoot-N-Anny Records....They were just 78’s at the time. But I think the Weavers' very first recording was done on a Hoot-N-Anny record. I did the “Hammer Song” and the “Banks of Marble. This is before they were recording for Decca.

"And I don’t know, we only did about a half a dozen such records. And then, in the mid-Fifties, we did the first LP of a live folk music concert. It’s called “Hoot-N-Anny Tonight,” subsequently reissued on Folkways under that title. So I’d always been scrambling for that kind of stuff.

"And then in 1958 I went to work for Moe Asch in Folkways, and over the next number of years worked with Moe...I had very little to do with the actual recording. That’s not my thing at all. So Moe was always engineer, the one who dealt with the performers and so on.

"But I became responsible, ultimately, for everything else relating to the production of a record. In effect, Moe would finish a tape master and turn it over to me.

"And I would deal [with]...the metal master, the stampers, the record pressing company, the printers who did the booklet, the people who pasted up the booklet. I’d edited, one way or another most of the booklets, deal with the typesetting, deal with the artists who designed the covers. Coordinate all of the production, and deal with a lot of the distribution also, and a lot of sales promotion stuff.

"So I learned a lot of different aspects of the record business, which put me in a position to know how to get Paredon off the ground and skip over a bunch of stages that somebody with less experience would’ve had to go through in a very painful way. And, you know, took advantage of that experience.

"We started out using the very producers that Folkways use, some of whom I had brought around to Folkways. But the printers, the pressing plants, the artists, the people who made stampers and so on, we used the same ones. They already knew me from the Folkways days. So that helped us establish some credit. And we knew what we were talking about.

"So we were able to move into production in a relatively smooth way, fairly quick. And then, once we had the records, we were able to utilize the contacts I’d made in terms of distribution--in some cases. I mean a lot of Folkways distributors didn’t--you know-- didn’t know what to do with this type of material."

Paredon Records Coo-Founders Irwin Silber and Barbara Dane 

 

Did Smithsonian Folkways Partner With U.S. Capitalism In Distributing Non-Commercially-Motivated Folk Music?

Most people who are into listening to non-commercially-motivated folk music have, historically, been anti-capitalist and been against the denial of a fair share of daily U.S. mass media access to anti-capitalist musicians--like Paul Robeson, Woody Guthrie, Rev. Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick and Matt Jones--by the U.S. capitalism's corporate media gatekeepers. And most people who are into listening to non-commercially-motivated folk music have, historically, been opposed to the commodification of folk music for-profit; and also to the exploitation by the U.S. capitalist system's corporate music industry record distribution companies of the folk music fans to whom they market their commodified folk music.

Yet Smithsonian Folkways Recordings has generally failed to focus much on opposing either the U.S. capitalist system's continued denial of a fair share of U.S. mass media daily access to post-1965 anti-capitalist, non-commercially-motivated, non-professional folk musicians who are working-class. Nor has Smithsonian Folkways demanded that the U.S. capitalism's music distribution system be operated in a non-commercial, non-exploitative way that provides U.S. folk music fans with their cultural right to listen to all folk music recordings for free.

One reason might be because the director emeritus of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings apparently saw nothing morally and politically contradictory in partnering with U.S. imperialism's capitalist system in marketing and distributing the non-commercially-motivated folk music that, historically,was generally collectively or individually created by anti-capitalist working-class people or anti-capitalist musicians; who, historically, had generally only received minimal sums of money or royalties from either Folkways or Paredon Records, in exchange for recording the albums whose folk music Smithsonian Folkways marketed.

As Timothy D. Taylor noted in his 2016 book Music and Capitalism, "Anthony Seeger, director emeritus of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, told me that that label had no qualms about using the capitalist infrastructure of distribution networks to disseminate its music." The Smithsonian Folkways director emeritus apparently told the Music and Capitalism author in 2012:

"At Folkways I always thought I was taking advantage of the capitalist system to distribute a kind of music that was unpopular, by definition...It seemed to me that capitalism and the market system actually was a really efficient way...for anybody anywhere in the world being able to get what they cared about. It seemed to me in principle you could in fact take advantage, sort of ride on the back of the capitalist system..."

Yet, coincidentally, few recordings of protest folk songs written by non-commercially-motivated anti-capitalist U.S. working-class folk musicians  or by members of the People's Music Network [PMN] that were written after 1980, have been produced or distributed by Smithsonian Folkways during the last three decades when it's been partnering and riding "on the back of the capitalist system."