ABSTRACT
This is an attempt to understand what kind of history lesson we receive when we listen to two songs-Kelly Harrell’s “Charles Guiteau” (1927) and Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers’ “White House Blues” (1926)—in the context of Harry Smith’s Anthology of Amer ican Folk Music. It is also an attempt to think about the ways that the Anthology engages with the Amer ican past. For when we listen to the second half of the first volume of this collection, we are pulled into a narrative of modern Amer ican history. Disc one has already taken the listener on a journey through time and space: from the opening Child Ballads through to “Omie Wise,” “Peg and Awl,” and “My Name is John Johanna,” we have moved from Old World to New, tracing the folkways of Amer ican colonization. When we reach “Bandit Cole the Younger” on the opening of disc two, however, we find ourselves in notably different territory. The specificity of event, time and place that this song of Jesse James gives the listener makes it clear that we are in Gilded Age America. It is, with no little irony, 1876, the year of America’s centenary. What follows, then, can be understood as a roughly chronological journey through Amer ican history at a particularly pivotal moment: the period of approximately fifty years separating the James Gang from the performers and performances that make up the Anthology, a half-century that might also be seen as the crucible of modern America. What also becomes immediately clear are the idiosyncrasies of the alternative history that these songs weave. Major events that are commonly read as the defining moments of the period are conspicuously absent: the Civil War, for example, happens off-stage, in the silence between the two halves of disc one and disc two, traceable only in the (unmentioned) Confederate careers of Cole Younger and his associates. Indeed, all other wars (Indian, Spanish-Amer ican) are excised from this narrative (except for perhaps class war)—as are, beyond their implicit effects on the narrators and subjects of these songs, the wider stories of politics and economics. Instead, the folkloric and the quotidian supplant traditional grand narratives; outlaws, murderers, steel-driving men, train drivers, farmers, and the passengers of the Titanic take the place of politicians and generals. The overarching story, if
there is one, is of the manifold effects of industrialization on the lives of (mainly Southern) black and white Amer icans during the birth of the twentieth century-a story that was still clearly being experienced at the time that these songs were recorded, was still pertinent at the time of the Anthology’s release, and which still echoes now. This is, very clearly, the result of Smith’s editorial practice. Whatever else their significance, the assemblage of these songs in this order provides the listener with a subaltern history of America across the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; it is a song cycle that is also a meditation on who gets remembered-and forgottenwhen conventional histories get written. Whilst other commentators have certainly recognized that this is the moment when the Anthology engages most directly with the narrative of Amer ican history, that recognition has also come with something of a dismissal for the exercise. For Greil Marcus,
Though roughly tracing a chronology of British fable and Amer ican happenstance, and in most cases tied to historical incidents, these ballads are not historical dramas. They dissolve a known history of wars and elections into a sort of national dream.1
