ABSTRACT
Harry Smith was a high school student in Bellingham, Washington, in the 1940s, when he began amassing what would eventually become a staggering collection of pre-war 78 rpm shellac recordings. Representing folk and popular musical styles that had by then fallen out of favor, Smith’s collection of 78s constituted an exercise in the anachronistic in terms of both its form and its content: the exploitation of untapped markets of regional vernacular music that led to the making of the recordings Smith would gather had been brought to a virtual halt with the onset of the Depression. In addition, the reconsolidation of the recording industry to serve a voracious new mass market following the war meant both new formats that suddenly rendered the 78 obsolete, as well as a professionalization of musicianship that resulted in the standardization of regional styles. In response to such developments, Smith’s Anthology of Amer ican Folk Music reintroduced audiences to the strange history of recorded sound in America that these more recent innovations had already begun to obscure. Smith’s Anthology thus evokes an earlier historical period, when the emergent technology of electrical recording was used to document idiosyncratic and unassimilated folk practices that had yet to be subsumed within the fully modernized popular recording industry. Appearing in 1952, the Anthology drew on recordings that had been made and assembled between 1927, when, quoting from Smith’s liner notes, “electronic recording made possible accurate music reproduction,” and 1932, when “the Depression
halted folk music sales.” During this five-year period, Smith claimed, “Amer ican music still retained some of the regional qualities evident in the days before the phonograph, radio and talking picture had tended to integrate local types.” Smith’s periodization has been echoed by more recent commentators on the history of sound recording: Andre Millard’s definitive history, for instance, identifies the late 1920s as the period when the “acoustic era” that began with Edison’s 1877 invention of the phonograph gave way to an “electrical era,” in which the 78 rpm shellac disc and the vacuum tube phonograph predominated. Millard also gives clear examples to illustrate the effects of the Depression on the recording industry. “The Depression affected the sales of ethnic and race records first,” Millard writes,
because their audiences were devastated in the economic downturn. African Amer ican artists were among the first to be dropped by record companies when sales dried up. Black music now went underground as musicians had to find other work to survive.
