Music and Folklore
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Music and Folklore was an American radio programme by Henry Jacobs on the campus radio station (WILL). Started in the early 1950s, it was one of the earliest presentations of "world music" to an American audience.
Jacobs often brought experts in certain ethnic music onto the show to provide background information. When no experts were available, he would not infrequently fake it - most notably in the case of "Sholem Stein", a putative Hebrew musicologist who claimed that calypso music had deep Rabbinical meanings. These were largely improvised with humorist and colleague Woody Leafer.
Pacifica station KPFA in Berkeley started receiving tapes of Music and Folklore not long after the program began, so Bay Area audiences were already familiar with Jacobs when he moved to San Francisco in 1953 and took up the show in person.
Moe Asch, the founder of Folkways Records, offered Jacobs the opportunity to release his first record, Radio Programme No 1 Audio Collage: Henry Jacobs’ Music and Folklore, in 1955.