Doc Shoe's Music Blog

Yes, this is Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly playing together.  How cool is that?

This is from one of my favorite records of all time, Folkways: The Original Vision.  Folkways was a label run by Moses Asch in 1948.  Moses had a real hard-on for folk music in all its manifestations: He recorded singer-songwriters, street musicians, the city sounds of streetcars and traffic jams, spoken word performances, world music, poetry, traditional ethnic music from every corner of the world and from every club and basement in New York, you name it.  (My personal favorite Folkways release—aside from The Original Vision, of course—is a record called Street and Gangland Rhythms: Beats and Improvisations By Six Boys In Trouble, a recording he made of a handful of very talented preteen kids living in the Projects.  Remind me to post that sometime.)  Moses ultimately released 2,168 records, and before he died in 1986 he arranged to sell the Folkways catalog to the Smithsonian Institute on the condition that these recordings be kept in print forever.  Be sure and check out their website right here if you want to find some awesome music you’ll never hear on the radio.