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H a r r y+S m i t h

The Anthology of American Folk Music
The Smithsonian

[ BY ALEX ABRAMOVICH ]

Of course, when "The Anthology" was released in 1952, we weren't the most introspective of peoples. Absorbed in the forward-looking lines on our gleaming new Fords, our Perry Como records and our Davy Crockett hats, we struggled to forget a recent, painful past and devoted our energies to other pursuits. When "The Anthology" was released, it had the impact of a Molotov cocktail going off in a hushed room, and it awakened strange and seismic forces. Instead of just altering the nation's consciousness, Smith ended up creating one: In some ways, the 1952 release of "The Anthology" was an excavation of a long-lost canon, the rediscovery of what Greil Marcus calls "an older, weirder America" lying right under the surface of the one we'd come to know.

Even today, 45 years after its initial release, an entire generation of musicians inspired by Smith lapse into reverential, religious terms when speaking of "The Anthology": "It was the Bible for hundreds of us, or more," folk singer Dave Van Ronk said at Smith's memorial in 1991. Guitarist John Fahey would happily "match 'The Anthology' up against any other single compendium of important information ever assembled. Dead Sea Scrolls? Nah," he says, "I'll take 'The Anthology.'" Four of its 84 tracks were covered by the Weavers; Joan Baez covered nine, Pete Seeger, 13. Bob Dylan covered six, and appropriated dozens of others (in some cases, a single track inspired a number of Dylan "originals" -- both "Maggie's Farm" and "Hard Times in New York Town," for instance, bear a striking resemblance to "Penny's Farm"). Jerry Garcia slowed the records down to 16 rpm to learn the solos. A few enterprising souls traveled south in a quixotic attempt to locate artists who'd fallen into the grooves of Smith's collection and then fallen off the face of the earth. Amazingly enough, they actually found a couple -- the strangest case being that of Dock Boggs, whose harrowing voice appears on some of the darkest popular recordings ever made. He disappeared into the depths of the Depression and spent the next 30 years working in a coal mine. Upon his "rediscovery," he -- along with Furry Lewis, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James and others -- was given a hero's welcome into the brave new world of the early '60s.

Still, "The Anthology" has been unavailable commercially for over a decade, and while the recordings it contains were scarcely 20 years old when Smith picked them in 1952, half a century has elapsed since then. How much can Smith's collection possibly have to say to a generation that's moved through and beyond Woody Guthrie, Dylan and the Weavers, or a music that's exploded into so many genres that a trip to the local HMV requires an almost encyclopedic knowledge of current catch-phrases just to be able to find what you're looking for?

A lot. In spite of the familiarity of many of these songs, hearing them in context is like watching a set of brilliantly turned phrases settle into a conversation -- and the rewards of eavesdropping are immense. In whittling his 20,000-plus records down to 84 tracks, Smith -- who always preferred being the bird to the ornithologist -- completely ignored the methods, parameters and objectives of John Lomax and the clique of ethnomusicologists. Uninterested in field recordings or issues of authenticity, Smith stuck to songs which were recorded and sold for profit. Intended for, bought and enjoyed by people who were very much like the artists themselves, these records have very little to do with edification, and everything to do with pleasure. (Surprisingly, the collection itself spans only five years, from 1927 to 1932, the years Smith considered to be the heyday of folk recordings.)

In ordering the songs, Smith paid no attention to chronology, geography or race. Rather, the songs in each of the three volumes are arranged poetically, connected in a way that makes perfect intuitive sense. For example, Volume I (Ballads), opens with Dick Justice's rendition of "Henry Lee," an early Child ballad in which a talking bird narrates the murder of a knight by his spurned lover. Then comes a series of increasingly fantastical tales of love and murder, most of them imported from England and Scotland, and each of them stranger than the last: A little boy dictates a message to his parents as he is stabbed to death in a flower garden; a wife convinces her drunk husband that the strange horse in his stable is a milk cow and the head on his pillow is a cabbage; a husband invites the devil to take his wife, only to have her wreak such havoc in hell that the devils come begging him to take her back. The supernatural ballads give way to a set of down-home murders and suicides: A father finds his daughter's body, and we hear her sing her own suicide note -- "over my grave place a snow white dove/to warn this world that I died for love"; Cole Younger regrets making the acquaintance of the James Boys and coal miner John Hardy hangs after shooting a man over a 25-cent crap game; President McKinley is assassinated by the young anarchist Leon Czolgosz. These disasters give way to a series of technological and natural catastrophes: trains wrecks, the sinking of the Titanic, craftsmen displaced by machines and farmers brought low by the lowly boll weevil. The progression is neither logical nor strictly historical, but as the sequence takes shape, these songs of love and lust, crime and punishment, despair and frustrated desire, begin to resemble nothing so much as a beautiful, unsettling portrait of the nation's collective unconscious.

Smith's structure weakens by Volume II, as thematic connections are subsumed by musical ones. "Social Songs" consists mostly of country dances and black spirituals, and each song seems to pick up a lick or a phrase from the one preceding it. (Folk revivalists of the '50s and '60s wrongly considered this volume to be the weakest of the bunch. Although few of the songs on Vol. II have the concentrated power of the selections Smith reserved for the first and third sets, the volume as a whole is woven together so beautifully that the individual songs come together like the movements of a great American Symphony -- perhaps the symphony Aaron Copland was never quite able to write.) By the third volume, Smith's structure has given way entirely, and this haphazard set -- which flits from nihilistic country blues to hillbilly love songs to rambunctious jug band sprees -- bounds along with an infectious, manic exuberance.

The Smithsonian has done a wonderful job of remastering the set, and the reissue comes with a treasure trove of goodies. The last disc doubles as a CD-ROM, with artist interviews, footage of Harry Smith and examples of his paintings and films. An exhaustive set of annotations is preceded by a lengthy essay by Greil Marcus (his best piece to date, and one in which he stays more or less within the bounds of sanity) and appreciations by everyone from Eric Von Schmidt to Elvis Costello are interspersed throughout. Best of all, the reissue includes a reprint of Smith's original accompanying booklet -- a cut-and-paste masterpiece whose wry, one-line descriptions of the songs read like telegrams sent to heaven: "Zoologic Miscegeny Achieved in Mouse Frog Nuptials, Relatives Approve" is Smith's distillation of "King Kong Kitchie Kitchie Ki-Me-O" (Chubby Parker's version of "Froggy-Went-A-Courtin'"). Of "The Titanic," Smith has this to say: "Manufacturers Proud Dream Destroyed At Shipwreck. Segregated Poor Die First," and "Stackalee" is reduced to the "Theft of a Stetson Hat [Causing A] Deadly Dispute. Victim Identifies Self As Family Man."

The reissue has gone through four pressings since its release this summer, and seeing record stores scramble to keep an $80 collection of 70-year-old songs in stock, it's hard not to wonder what kind of impact Smith's anthology will have today. Probably, as the Anthology seeps into the corners of our collective musical consciousness, its effects will be less trumpeted, but no less dramatic. Today's popular music is a layer of frost spread thin over the depths of "The Anthology," and as we scratch its surface, break the ice and immerse ourselves in its amniotic fluids, we might find that this time around, Harry Smith's done something far more impressive than change the world -- he's changed us.
SALON | Oct. 6, 1997