Interlude 1. “This unknown body of Amer icana”: Alan Lomax’s List of Amer ican Folk Songs on Commercial Records and the Anthology of Amer ican Folk Music

Since its release in 1952-and much more so since its rerelease in 1997Harry Smith’s Anthology of Amer ican Folk Music has given the impression of having been sprung utterly from the ether, sui generis and fully formed, like Athena from Zeus’ head. Smith’s peculiar mystical strivings do nothing to discourage this. But without an obscure Library of Congress monograph, compiled by in 1940 by a twenty-five-year-old folklorist at the Library of Congress, the Anthology might have sounded very different, if it had sounded at all.