In the middle of January, with temperatures hovering around zero degrees, John Smith and his colleagues at Smithsonian Folkways drove a truck up to a 19th century homestead in Sharon, Connecticut to pick up a record label. For over 50 years, the remolded barn and carriage house had been the headquarters of Folk-Legacy and the home of two of its founders, Sandy and Caroline Paton. The Patons, along with their business partner Lee Haggerty, founded Folk-Legacy in 1961 and dedicated their lives to recording, preserving and releasing traditional folk songs and ballads from across North America and the British Isles, as well as new records by folk revivalists who embraced and built upon those traditions like Hedy West, Gordon Bok, Anne Mayo Muir and Ed Trickett. But when Smith, the Associate Director at Folkways, and his team arrived, they found all that history \u2014 over 140 albums, reels of master tapes, correspondence, business records, photographs, books and other trinkets \u2014 in less than ideal conditions.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe house was in disrepair, it was cold, there was little heat,\u201d Smith recalls. \u201cTo put it mildly, the earth was starting to reclaim the house. There were a lot of little critters in there.\u201d<\/p>\n
It took a week to pack up Folk-Legacy, but the experience was revelatory: \u201cWhen you\u2019re boxing up a record label like that, you learn so much in such a short amount of time,\u201d Smith tells Rolling Stone<\/em>. \u201cYou\u2019re going through the history of the label, but it\u2019s also their space \u2014 you\u2019re feeling the energy that\u2019s there, the grassroots way they operated and the community they built and the sheer love that the artists and the fans of Folk-Legacy have for that.\u201d<\/p>\n Smithsonian Folkways officially announced the acquisition of Folk-Legacy on Wednesday with a 15-track compilation, A Living Tradition<\/em>, that offers an overview of the label\u2019s output and was compiled by the Patons\u2019 granddaughter, Juliana, who spent the past few months working as an intern at Folkways.<\/p>\n Folk-Legacy became the 19th record label that Smithsonian Folkways has acquired, starting with Folkways itself, which became part of the Smithsonian in 1987. Founded in 1948 by Moses Asch, Folkways is best known as the home of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Leadbelly, as well as the label behind the mythic and much revered compilation, Anthology of American Folk Music<\/em><\/a>. When the Smithsonian acquired Folkways, the label already had a vast catalogue \u2014 2,168 records, released over 40 years (amounting to about a record a week). Now, Smithsonian Folkways boasts over 60,000 songs, spanning genres, decades and continents.<\/p>\n Huib Schippers, the Director of Smithsonian Folkways, likes to say the label is in the \u201cforever business,\u201d though in the streaming era, it may seem like everyone is. Never has so much music been so readily available, but this accessibility belies both the gaps in the universal jukebox and the fact that recorded music, no matter what form it\u2019s in, will always be as fragile as a 78 RPM shellac record. In March, it was revealed that MySpace lost<\/a> an estimated 50 million songs by 14 million artists during a server migration, and in June, The New York Times Magazine<\/em><\/a> reported that approximately 500,000 recordings \u2014 including irreplaceable master tapes \u2014 were allegedly destroyed<\/a> in a 2008 Universal Music Group vault fire.<\/p>\n But for Smithsonian Folkways, being in the \u201cforever business\u201d is an ethos that permeates their preservation efforts and their approach to working with contemporary artists. It\u2019s epitomized in the mandate Asch gave the Smithsonian when it acquired Folkways: That every recording remain available in perpetuity. Not all 60,000 Folkways recordings are timeless, great or even merely good, nor are all of them of major historical importance. But as a collective, they\u2019re a testament to the scope of recorded sound and the ways people over the world make and share music.<\/p>\n Folk-Legacy\u2019s earliest releases<\/strong> were often by traditional singers that Sandy and Caroline Paton and their friends recorded during their travels. \u201cThis was really, really<\/em> roots music,\u201d says Folkways archivist Jeff Place. \u201cThat was their niche.\u201d<\/p>\n There was Eugene Rhodes of Michigan City, Indiana, a blues guitarist and singer who honed his craft while hopping around the South; Marie Hare of New Brunswick, Canada, who sang a capella broadside ballads; Sarah Ogan Gunning of Knox County, Kentucky, whose songs were steeped in her struggle to help local coal miners organize; and Harry Cox, a farmer from Norfolk, England with head full of traditional English ballads. The first Folk-Legacy release was by Frank Proffitt, an old-time banjo player from Reese, North Carolina, who played a key role in the preservation of the 1860s murder ballad \u201cTom Dooley\u201d: It was Proffitt who taught the song to folklorist Frank Warner, whose 1952 version inspired the Kingston Trio\u2019s 1958 smash, which helped spur the Sixties folk revival. Proffitt\u2019s rendition of \u201cTom Dooley\u201d first appeared on his 1962 album for Folk-Legacy.<\/p>\n