We’re exciting about a new film in the works from Yale Strom. You can make a tax-deductible contribution to San Diego Folk Heritage here, all of which will go toward the making of Moe Asch: Soundtrack of America.
Moe Asch: Soundtrack of America tells the extraordinary story of Moses “Moe” Asch, the visionary founder of Folkways Records whose life’s work preserved the musical soul of America. Born in Warsaw in 1905 to renowned Yiddish writer Sholem Asch, Moe’s early life was shaped by displacement, migration, and cultural survival. Fleeing antisemitism, war, and upheaval, his family journeyed from Poland to Paris and finally to New York, experiences that profoundly shaped his worldview and lifelong commitment to giving voice to the unheard.
Trained in electronics in interwar Germany, Asch returned to New York as an audio engineer just as radio and recording technology were transforming culture. His work building a transmitter for the Yiddish-language radio station WEVD sparked a passion for documenting music as lived experience. After early setbacks and bankruptcy, Asch founded Folkways Records, guided by a radical belief: every sound mattered. From American folk and labor songs to Yiddish music, blues, spoken word, and global traditions, Asch recorded more than 2,100 albums—keeping every one in print, regardless of commercial success.
Through rare archival material, music, and historical context, the film explores how Asch’s immigrant roots, progressive politics, and moral convictions shaped the artists he recorded: Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, Barbara Dane, and many others, and helped define America’s cultural memory. Drawing exclusively from the Smithsonian Folkways archives, the film’s soundtrack is itself a living testament to Asch’s enduring legacy: a democratic archive of sound that became, in the words of The New York Times, “the Talmudic source for folk music in America.”