ABSTRACT
At the 1991 Grammy Awards ceremony (a year when the best new album was Phil Collins’s Another Day in Paradise and the best new artist was Mariah Carey), an aged, bespectacled man, dressed in an elegant suit and sporting a white ponytail, climbed the steps to the award podium to receive the Chairman’s Merit Award for a collection of music that he had assembled almost forty years earlier. After thanking the audience and informing them that he had flown all the way from Colorado to receive the award, he made a declaration: “I’m glad to say that my dreams came true. I saw America changed through music.”1 Those faithful words were received by the audience with apparently little enthusiasm; but to the few who remembered his Anthology of Amer ican Folk Music, the frail figure may have appeared like a shaman fulfilling a prophecy. With the 1997 Smithsonian-Folkways reissue of the Anthology still six years away, both Harry Smith and his collection had yet to make their triumphant re-entry into the musical consciousness of America and the world. It must come as no surprise, then, that few in the audience responded to his gleeful remarks. But at least someone in the audience was aware of the significant role that Smith and the Anthology had played. He had lived it. That same year, Bob Dylan was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award. To see the appointed bard of the folk revival and the driving force behind the resurgence of folk-inspired music in the 1960s treading the same stage carried a symbolic gravitas, a sort of “passing of the torch,” both men a living testimony of the process through which Amer ican folk music had managed to revitalize itself during that pivotal era of political activism and musical renaissance. When Smithsonian-Folkways did reissue the Anthology in 1997, critics like Greil Marcus, Robert Cantwell and Tom Piazza hailed the Anthology as the most important musical artifact of the revival.2 John Fahey, the virtuoso primitivist guitarist, asserted in the liner notes to the rerelease that Smith had single-handedly created the folk canon and that he would “match the Anthology up against any other single compendium of important information ever assembled.”3 But as Kathleen Skinner’s thorough study of the Anthology’s sales figures at the times of its original
release reveal, Smith’s collection sold poorly and was mostly ignored by music critics. It was rather an object of reverence, a well-kept secret passed around among savvy listeners and collectors that grew in importance with time. The legitimization of the Anthology as a historical record of American folk music was therefore a post-1960s phenomenon and was due to a series of concomitant factors: the growing scholarly status of folk music and the drive to preserve it, the respectability acquired by Moses Asch and Harry Smith as musical savants, and finally the acquisition of Asch’s Folkways by the Smithsonian Institute. What has thus far received less attention, however, are the new-and very evident-legacies of the Anthology in the wake of its 1997 reissue. The new edition emerged at the precise moment when the new sub-genre known as “Amer icana” was taking hold in the Amer ican musical panorama, infusing the work of well-known artists such as Beck, Nick Cave, Elvis Costello, and many others with a new “roots” sensibility. The Anthology therefore became part-indeed, a crucial part-of a new revival of Amer ican roots music as both the newly canonized repository of folk music, and as an inspiration for a new generation of artists. It came to represent the plural nature, both cultural and stylistic, of Amer ican vernacular music. But rather than simply exerting a direct influence on the new wave of folk artists, the Anthology reissue also continues to constitute a canon of lyrical and musical modes that has been shaping some of the multifaceted expressions of folk-inspired music since the late 1990s. This chapter will therefore trace some of the subsequent ramifications of the Anthology for contemporary Amer ican musical culture, what Robert Cantwell has called “the other lives” of the Anthology, in both its overt and covert expressions.4 In so doing, it will attempt to historicize the Anthology’s cultural significance in the development of contemporary Amer ican folk music as well as illuminate some of the most significant performers and musical currents. The seeds of these “other lives” were clearly planted by the Anthology’s first box-set reissue in 1997: this momentous event set in motion a process of revitalization of America’s musical past that continues to this day. Its ongoing legacy was first celebrated through tribute concerts and compilations that helped to establish the Anthology as an essential formative archive for any aspiring musician. Even more recently, Smith’s collection was reissued again in 2014, in a new acclaimed vinyl edition by a small independent label, a further sign of its persistent fascination for new throngs of folk aficionados. Reissues and tributes aside, the richness and variety of the Amer ican folk canon presented by the Anthology has constantly inspired the evolution of the folk idiom into several different permutations. The early 2000s saw the rise of the “free” or “freak” folk movement, a genre that united a disparate array of bands interested in the traditional folk tunes as well as in the mystic aspects of Smith’s collection. More or less contemporaneously, the reappearance of the lone singer-songwriter, arguably its most
fruitful and enduring legacy, expressed in an intimate, sophisticated and yet traditional musical idiom the idiosyncrasies of the Anthology’s repertoire. In a different vein, the more choral and communal expressions of latter-day “big-folk” of bands like Mumford and Sons and the Lumineers have managed to bring the folk idiom to a wider audience through a clever mix of highly rhythmic folk and rock music. Finally, the more recent development of a new wave of “dark” folk, with such uncanny influences from genres like metal and dark ambient, have resuscitated some of the most disquieting aspects of Amer ican folk music-particularly its obsession with death and the spiritual world. At least to some extent, all of these trends find their root in the Anthology.
