Biographical History
Sam Eskin was a self-made man who tried his hand at a variety of professions and eventually found an outlet for his artistic expression in folk music. Born in Washington, D.C. on July 5, 1898, Eskin grew up in Baltimore but left home at a young age to explore the world. Consequently, his formal education ended with the eighth grade. Over the course of the next twenty-five years, Eskin's experiences as a taxi driver, clerk, magazine reporter, logger, merchant seaman, cattle hand, cannery worker, and traveling United Parcel Service (UPS) consultant exposed him to a wide variety of songs, including work songs, sea shanties, and American versions of traditional ballads. In 1938, he began seriously collecting and performing folk music. With the job security and benefits accrued after a fifteen-year stint with UPS, by 1945, Eskin was free to pursue his interests in the collection and performance of folk music.
During the period between 1938 and 1945, Eskin gathered material with a growing awareness of folksong scholarship, reading widely on the subject to familiarize himself with the significance of folksongs as cultural and social documentation, and as an aesthetic means of expression for the people who sang them. As a self-taught folklorist, Eskin's primary interests were the collection, preservation, and evaluation of American folksongs, indigenous music, dance music, primitive drumming, oral storytelling, and oral histories. Eskin's papers and correspondence document an awareness of folk music's connection with folklore and musicology, which is reflected in the sound recordings he collected in the field.
Eskin's interest in recording folk music came at a period of technological transition, and his early and successful investments in UPS stock provided him with the financial freedom to experiment with newly emerging recording formats. Eskin embraced new technologies and upgraded his disc and reel-to-reel tape recorders, amplifiers, and speakers on a regular basis. At his permanent home in Woodstock, New York, he was infamous for showing new friends and visitors the eight foot long wooden optimal base speaker he had built. The evolution of sound recording techniques in America from the 1930s to the 1960s is reflected in Eskin's own moves from acetate discs to wire recordings to reel-to-reel magnetic tape.
From 1945 to 1953, Eskin embarked on several cross-country trips through the United States and Mexico, traveling from state to state in a silver trailer from which he made field recordings, notations, and transcriptions. By the mid 1950s, Eskin began a series of trips abroad, visiting Jamaica, Cuba, England, Scotland, Spain, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Morocco, Hong Kong, the Philippines, India, and Thailand, while often recording and collecting samples of the local music and lore he encountered. With his casual demeanor and energetic passion for music, Eskin easily made new acquaintances and maintained correspondence with a number of musicians he met in his travels.
Eskin also shared his thoughts on folk music through correspondence and visits with other folklorists in the field, including renowned collectors and performers Pete Seeger and Sydney Robertson Cowell. Professionally, Eskin lectured at various universities, workshops, and folk festivals, and released two commercial albums, Sea Shanties and Loggers Songs , and the four-disc set Sam Eskin Songs and Ballads . From 1948 to 1972, working with fellow enthusiasts and music producers Emory Cook and Moses Asch, Eskin also contributed original source material, co-produced, or performed on 19 albums released under the Cook Laboratories/Folkways Records label.
Bibliography: Greer, Chia. Remembering Sam Eskin. Home Page. 13 December 2001 http://www.casa-chia.org/Sam/eskin00.html .