Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music

America changed through music

Ross Hair, Thomas Ruys Smith, Ross Hair, Thomas Ruys Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317123576
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Released in 1952, The Anthology of American Folk Music was the singular vision of the enigmatic artist, musicologist, and collector Harry Smith (1923–1991). A collection of eighty-four commercial recordings of American vernacular and folk music originally issued between 1927 and 1932, the Anthology featured an eclectic and idiosyncratic mixture of blues and hillbilly songs, ballads old and new, dance music, gospel, and numerous other performances less easy to classify.

Where previous collections of folk music, both printed and recorded, had privileged field recordings and oral transmission, Smith purposefully shaped his collection from previously released commercial records, pointedly blurring established racial boundaries in his selection and organisation of performances. Indeed, more than just a ground-breaking collection of old recordings, the Anthology was itself a kind of performance on the part of its creator.

Over the six decades of its existence, however, it has continued to exert considerable influence on generations of musicians, artists, and writers. It has been credited with inspiring the North American folk revival—"The Anthology was our bible", asserted Dave Van Ronk in 1991, "We all knew every word of every song on it"—and with profoundly influencing Bob Dylan. After its 1997 release on CD by Smithsonian Folkways, it came to be closely associated with the so-called Americana and Alt-Country movements of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Following its sixtieth birthday, and now available as a digital download and rereleased on vinyl, it is once again a prominent icon in numerous musical currents and popular culture more generally.

This is the first book devoted to such a vital piece of the large and complex story of American music and its enduring value in American life. Reflecting the intrinsic interdisciplinarity of Smith's original project, this collection contains a variety of new perspectives on all aspects of the Anthology.

Part I
Introductions

1 Introduction

America changed through music

Ross Hair and Thomas Ruys Smith

“Really, is it yours? I had supposed it was something old.”¹

Painter, filmmaker, occultist, anthropologist, musicologist, collector: Harry Everett Smith (1923–1991) was a major—if somewhat notorious—figure within the postwar American avant-garde. His connections span from Aleister Crowley (“Probably he’s my father,” Smith once told P. Adams Sitney) to the bohemian and countercultural milieus of the Beat Generation, New York’s East Village, and Manhattan’s legendary Chelsea Hotel.² As its name suggests, however, this collection is not so much concerned with the life and legend that is Harry Smith, but with one of his greatest achievements. The Anthology of American Folk Music was a seminal collection of eighty-four folk, blues, old-time, country, Cajun, and gospel 78s, originally issued between 1927 and 1932, arranged into three volumes by Smith from his own collection, and first released by Folkways Records in 1952. Of course, such a description only hints at the eclectic, eccentric, esoteric delights that the Anthology has to offer: it was, in almost every way, an unlikely object. Where other collections of folk music, both printed and recorded, privileged field recordings and oral transmission, Smith purposefully shaped his collection from previously released commercial records. Where others tried to draw clear lines of demarcation between “black” and “white” musical traditions, Smith pointedly muddled such racial boundaries in his selection and organisation of performances. More than just a ground-breaking collection of old recordings, the Anthology was itself a kind of performance on the part of its creator. Smith not only collected and curated the records that made up the Anthology, but he also produced a detailed and equally enigmatic booklet to accompany the recordings, overlaying the whole collection with mystic meaning.

Though in many ways the most visible artifact of Smith’s varied career—its connections to Bob Dylan alone have helped to guarantee that—the Anthology has also received relatively little critical comment. What it has received plenty of—particularly in the wake of its 1997 CD rerelease by Smithsonian Folkways—are encomiums to its status as a vital musical document: a central tenet of the American Folk Music Revival, essential to the development of the counterculture in 1960s, an influence on punk, and significant yet more broadly within the history of American culture. It still serves as both destination and gateway for the musically curious. As early as 1973, in the introduction to a largely forgotten collection of sheet music transcriptions of the songs contained in the Anthology, Josh Dunson provided a description of Smith’s assemblage that still stands as one of the great tributes to its apparently boundless appeal and significance:

The Anthology is one of the great masterpieces of modern communication. It is filled with centers of energy and musical styles that both stretch and deepen a person—a massive work which continues to be a challenge after almost twenty years. I guess each person who knows the Anthology … has a story about what he felt when he discovered that set of six records—the surprise, the fire, the hours pouring [sic] over Harry Smith’s notes…. The Anthology has power. It burns Woodstock, shunts electricity, landslides the Stones, makes the present obsolete—the past and future primary.³

It was, though, the booklet accompanying the beautifully produced Smithsonian-Folkways reissue in 1997—boasting a plethora of equally fervent endorsements, homages, and recollections—that really helped to cement its mystique. There, renowned guitarist John Fahey claims that he would “match this Anthology up against any other compendium of important information ever assembled.” “Dead Sea Scrolls?” he asks: “Nah. I’ll take the Anthology.”⁴ In a similar spirit, the renowned fiddle-player Peter Stampfel considers the Anthology “the Touchstone, the Grail, The Real Deal. The Nitty Gritty Ground Zero,” and Jon Pankake, co-editor of the 1960s vernacular music journal, The Little Sandy Review, claims it as “a central and most powerful document.”⁵ Elsewhere, with equal enthusiasm, the former New York Dolls front man David Johansen has proposed that the Anthology is “like the Rosetta Stone of the folk movement”: “Everybody in the ’50s would learn those songs as their basic repertoire and take off from there. And that sure led to a lot of interesting places.”⁶ The weight of such statements was only amplified by a series of concerts organized by Hal Wilner between 1999 and 2001 in tribute to Smith’s Anthology, under the banner of The Harry Smith Project, which included performances by, among many others, Beck, Wilco, Nick Cave, Beth Orton, Lou Reed, Sonic Youth, and Richard Thompson. And they were compounded further still by the 2000 release by John Fahey’s Revenant Records of the planned-but-never-executed fourth volume of the Anthology.

At the same moment, the Anthology generated its most significant critical commentaries—the interpretations of its meaning that continue to shape its reception almost two decades later. Greil Marcus stands at their head with “The Old, Weird America”, an essay that is part of both the liner notes to the 1997 Anthology reissue and Marcus’s Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (1997). Thanks to both of those contexts, it is safe to wager that Marcus’s essay has been the entry-point for more Anthology listeners than any other source. Even the title itself has come to serve as a shorthand for the kind of music contained on the Anthology, and a lot more besides. Influential for a wealth of reasons, and endlessly quotable, Marcus frames the Anthology as “an imagined America one never dared imagine before”:

Here is a mystical body of the republic, a kind of public secret: a declaration of what sort of wishes and fears lie behind any public act, a declaration of a weird but clearly recognizable America within the America of the exercise of institutional majoritarian power.⁷

He is also unabashed in his characterization of the collection as “the founding document of the American folk revival.”⁸ And, nearly twenty years later, Marcus remains critically engaged with the Anthology and its music. In 2015, a third of his Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations was devoted to Anthology favorite Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground.”⁹

Hardly less influential was Robert Cantwell’s account of the Anthology, in When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (1996), as a “memory theater … suffused with strangeness”:

By confounding the familiar racial, regional and sexual categories, or by cutting them so finely that they are reduced to a heterogeneous new substance, or by juxtaposing them with such violence, or such subtlety, that they tend either to paralyze or to mimic one another, the Anthology robs us of the handy frames in which we transport our folksong and presents it nakedly—or, rather, greets us after we have been stripped naked, intellectually speaking, so that we can’t really conceive it all. Instead, we must experience it directly, something utterly strange and yet, because it is made of things we know, hauntingly familiar.¹⁰

Geoff Ward—featured in this volume—made a similarly significant statement by devoting a chapter of The Writing of America (2002) to the Anthology. Smith’s collection, Ward asserted, was “a salvaging of cultural detritus, of lost names on crackling 78s, and a template for the artistry of sampling and collage in an electronic age”—in short, “a pivotal American creation” and the type of “hybrid form” essential for America’s understanding of itself.¹¹ And Ward, too, continues to engage with Smith and his creations, featuring him as a character in his novel, You’re Not Dead (2015).¹² No less essential were two collections—Rani Singh’s Think of the Self Speaking: Harry Smith, Selected Interviews (1998) and Rani Singh and Andrew Perchuk’s Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the American Vernacular (2010)—which proved vital for those attempting to understand all parts of Smith’s career.

Such a rich, if relatively boutique, bibliography might suggest that the critical status and significance of the Anthology, at least amongst a certain coterie, is almost a settled point. Yet not everyone agrees. Robert Christgau, for example, reviewing the Anthology reissue in Spin, concludes by suggesting that:

We needn’t believe [that] The Anthology of American Folk Music represents the “real” folk, much less the “real” America. It’s one compelling and engrossing version of those chimeras—profoundly influential rather than the Rosetta stone. It would appear, after all, that the strains of ’60s rock forged by Jimi Hendrix, Lou Reed, Smokey Robinson, Randy Newman, and the Nuggets collective have their proximate sources in traditions peripheral to these at best.¹³

Smith’s contemporaries have also expressed skepticism about the extent of his achievement. Pioneering blues scholar Samuel Charters, in response to the conference celebrating the Anthology’s sixtieth anniversary organized by the editors of this collection in 2012, voiced unequivocal skepticism—“a small muted protest”—about Smith and his folk legacy. “I’ve had a long, complicated relationship with Harry’s set,” Charters insists:

The LPs were fine and fun—but no big deal … I liked some of it—some of it I already knew—and it all seemed to be to be just part what had been going on with the reissues of old jazz and blues recordings since the 1930s. Fred Ramsey was doing a twelve-volume LP reissue for Moe Asch of the history of jazz at the same time and his volume 1 had a lot of the same kinds of material.

Referring to those enthusiasts “whose lives had begun with the original three volumes,” and who considered them “the roots of everything that ever happened in America,” Charters remarks:

I wish some of these people could somehow see that what happened in the 1950s was just a continuation of the gathering and collecting of vernacular music in the South that had been going on for nearly a century. Everything I learned was from what people like Fred Ramsey and Bill Russell had done in New Orleans and the South in the 1930s—their recordings of musicians like Leadbelly and Bunk Johnson and Jelly Roll Morton—the books and articles and eventually LPs and films. Why does Harry get the credit for something that was much larger than his set? I dunnow.¹⁴

As Charters intimates, the Anthology is, at least on a certain level, just one important current within the vastly broader flood of the process of collecting and documenting American vernacular music—a tradition that, by the time that Smith p...