The resultant Folkways anthology, issued in 1952 under the title "American Folk Music", was a compilation of recordings of folk music issued on hillbilly and race records that had previously been released commercially on 78 rpm. These dated from the abbreviated dawn, sometimes called the "golden age", of the commercial country music industry, that is, between 1927, when, as Smith explained, "acoustic recording made possible accurate music reproduction, and 1932, when the Depression halted folk music sales", and the artists, in many cases, sunk into obscurity. Originally issued as budget discs marketed to regional, rural audiences, these records had long been known, collected, and occasionally reissued by folklorists and aficionados, but this was the first time such a large compilation was made available to affluent, non-specialist urban dwellers. LP discs could hold much more material than the old three-minute 78s, and had greater fidelity and far less surface noise. The Anthology was packaged as a set of three, boxed albums with a total of 6 LPs. Each box front a different color: red, blue, and green – in Smith's schema, representing the alchemical elements. Priced at $25.00 per two-disc set, they were relatively expensive. For the money-challenged, Moe Asch maintained a retail record store in the 1950s near Union Square Park where he sold all 6 of the Anthology records for $1 each, as well as others from his catalogue. The $1 records were sold without their original jackets, and with a hole punched through the label area to indicate that the record was remaindered and not to be sold for the full retail price. A fourth album, comprising topical songs from the Depression era, was originally planned by Asch and his long-time assistant, Marian Distler, and never completed by Smith. It was issued in 2000, nine years after his death in CD format by Revenant Records with a 95-page booklet of tribute essays to Smith.