When I started to consider this writing, a tactile impression occurred to me as a powerful sense memory. I first thought that I must have experienced it as a very young child, which is almost certainly untrue and wishful thinking; more likely, the distinctive pleasure of it is enough to suggest formativeness. I’m talking about running a finger along the seam where the three-quarter tip-on printed cover of a Folkways LP meets its textured jacket—such a singular and satisfying experience that it seems to me like I’ve been doing it all my life.

Folkways, like the great big world it refracts through the prism of its catalog, is a cacophonous too-muchness, an immense finitude—practically speaking measurable, but impossible for any one human to wrap her head around. Thus efforts like this one can only be provisional, piecemeal—fated to come up absurdly short, particularly if you—like me—feel not just profound awe for and gratitude to the label, but a deep and abiding affection, like to an old master to whom you’ve been long apprenticed. The thing about that apprenticeship, though, is that it will never end, because you won’t be able to listen to every Folkways record. That’s OK. It’s never not rewarding to make an effort. And some you do listen to, you won’t like, or won’t trust, or you’ll think are failures or mediocrities, or ethically or otherwise compromised. Like people, Folkways records aren’t all good—this realization marked for me an important threshold between innocence and experience—but each is singular, and, if enlightenment is a goal, something to be reckoned with and instructed by on its own terms.

I hope it will throw no one under the bus to recall that in the early-mid-2000s, there was a publicist on staff at Smithsonian Folkways who was remarkably generous with promo copies. I did a radio show back then and was on the service list for new releases—plenty nice in itself, like when the first six volumes of the Music of Central Asia set (the gorgeously recorded, designed, and packaged CD/DVD sets underwritten by the Aga Khan) showed up in the mail. But the guy was also totally open to solicitations for back-catalog. At one point he sent me a complete run of Philip Yampolsky’s 20-volume Music of Indonesia series, which I can’t remember having—and can’t believe I could have had—the nerve to ask for. I suppose this was around the time that the label started doing the made-to-order CDs with the three-quarter tip-on printed covers designed to look like those of the LPs (charming to look at in hand and on shelf, if unable to quite match that tactile pleasure). No matter how random my request—Ding Dong Dollar, the compilation of anti-Polaris-nuclear-sub songs by Scottish folkies comes to mind—he’d send it on one of those bespoke discs. There was a crazy magic in this, genie-in-the-bottle stuff, and my senses of propriety and moderation and self-respect went to war with my hunger for more, more, more of that intoxicating Folkways too-muchness.

This mix was super fun and rewarding to put together.* It was also a much-needed retreat from the actual world, which is far less heartbreaking when reflected/reconstituted in the Folkways catalog. I hope it’s rewarding to listen to, and I’m grateful to you for making an effort.

*It was also made exponentially easier by only including selections from Folkways releases, with the exception of two Palestinian recordings taken from LPs on the great Paredon label. The second, Marcel Khalifé’s setting of Mahmoud Darwish’s poem “The Passport,” suggests the potential pitfalls of this kind of witness-bearing: …“To them my wound was an exhibit / For a tourist who loves to collect photographs.”