ABSTRACT
Painter, filmmaker, occultist, anthropologist, musicologist, collector: Harry Everett Smith (1923-1991) was a major-if somewhat notorious-figure within the postwar Amer ican 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 Amer ican 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 Amer ican 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 Amer ican 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
