It’s also deeply confounding. There are times when I have clung to it as a kind of last hope, believing that it’s an object that unlocks other objects; there are other times when I have found it solipsistic and nonsensical and inherently ill conceived. Whatever the Anthology offers, it’s not revealed quickly.
Like most serious collectors, Harry Smith got going early. The arc of his life is both predictable—as if, like a river, it could have only ever led to one place—and meandering. He was born on May 29, 1923, the son of a boat captain and a schoolteacher, theosophists who encouraged his burgeoning interest in ethnography. He spent a good chunk of his high school years studying the tribal ceremonies of the Lummi Indians in his hometown of Bellingham, Washington, and started amassing 78s around the same time. The first one he bought was by Tommy McClennan, a rough-voiced blues singer who recorded in Chicago in the early 1940s. (“It sounded strange and I looked for others,” Smith later said of it.)
In his early twenties, Smith was just undersized enough to be able to crawl inside the fuselage of an airplane, and after six months working for Boeing as an engine degreaser, he decamped to San Francisco, then Berkeley, and finally New York City, where, in desperate need of cash for things like food and shelter, he tried to pitch his record collection wholesale to Folkways Records. Instead, cofounder Moe Asch persuaded him to produce a multidisc compilation for the label. Asch’s biographer, Peter Goldsmith, suggests that Smith’s “appearance and manner” might have reminded Asch of his pal and partner Woody Guthrie, another charmingly arrogant polymath who recorded for Folkways in the 1940s. (Incidentally, Guthrie—who spent a good percentage of 1952 in a state psychiatric ward—adored the Anthology, and in a letter to Asch admitted to playing it “several hundreds of times.”) In a 1972 Sing Out! interview with Ethel Raim and Bob Norman, Asch confirmed his admiration for Smith’s purview, saying “[Smith] understood the content of the records. He knew their relationship to folk music, their relationship to English literature, and their relationship to the world.” Smith was paid $200 for his work on the Anthology and promised a twenty-cent royalty for each copy sold.
Although he’s now equally beloved for his experimental films, paintings, and animations, Smith is about as close as the practice of 78 collecting has ever come to producing a known cult figure. (These days Robert Crumb also qualifies, but his collecting is far more incidental to his legacy.) Smith, who died in 1991 in room 328 of the Chelsea Hotel in New York, a building already infamous for its output of body bags, was the kind of guy who designed his own tarot cards. He was a dedicated mystic, a consecrated bishop in the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica (a fraternal organization based on Aleister Crowley’s The Book of the Law), and, supposedly, an initiated Lummi shaman. He palled around with folks like Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso, and was eventually appointed “Shaman in Residence” at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, a Buddhist-inspired university founded by an exiled Tibetan tulku. Along with records and rare books, which he arranged on his shelves by height, Smith collected Seminole textiles, hand-decorated Ukrainian Easter eggs, and anything shaped like a hamburger. He lived with a goldfish in a series of tiny apartments crammed with ephemera (quilts, weavings, clay models, mounted string figures, women’s dresses). In 1984 he donated “the largest known paper airplane collection in the world”—sourced exclusively from the streets of New York City—to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. Smith was also an obsessive chronicler of found sound, be it the peyote songs of the Kiowa Indians or the wheezing vagrants of the Lower East Side; one Fourth of July he recorded every single noise he encountered.
In almost all the photos I’ve seen of Harry Smith, he’s wearing plastic-framed, thick-lensed eyeglasses and sporting a robust, scraggly beard. His skin looks papery but his eyes are sharp, narrowed, and alive under two drooping lids. In my favorite shot, taken by Ginsberg in 1985, he’s pouring whole milk from a cardboard carton into a glass jar (“transforming milk into milk,” Ginsberg noted). His face is approximately 80 percent glasses. Atop his head, little tufts of white hair wisp to the left, the consistency of fresh spiderweb. He appears to be about ten thousand years old.
Cantankerous and exacting in the manner of most collectors, Smith often bickered with his peers about money or objects. He would demand to borrow a book or record and then refuse to give it back. As his archivist and friend Rani Singh told me, he was constantly informing people that their belongings were better off in his collection. (“ ‘It should be in my collection, it shouldn’t be in your collection,’ ” she recalled him saying.) His compulsions were driven by a fierce internal logic; Smith was painstaking in his pursuit of proper serialization, even if it meant pilfering other people’s most beloved shit. Things, he believed, belonged next to other things—like sentences in a story, books along a shelf, songs on an LP. “He was looking for undercurrents. He was looking for ideas that were disappearing, nuances that were disappearing, trying to make connections not just among 78s from Georgia or North Carolina versus upper New York State or Canada, but connections between the string figures that he was interested in from all cultures across the world,” Singh said. “He was comparing string figures to tarot cards to 78 records to creation myths to all these other things and finding the things that link all of us as humans together.”
It’s still hard to quantify the cultural impact of the Anthology. In the liner notes to its Smithsonian reissue, John Fahey wrote: “Had he never done anything with his life but this Anthology, Harry Smith would still have borne the mark of genius across his forehead. I’d match the Anthology up against any other single compendium of important information ever assembled. Dead Sea Scrolls? Nah. I’ll take the Anthology. Make no mistake: there was no ‘folk’ canon before Smith’s work. That he had compiled such a definitive document only became apparent much later, of course. We record-collecting types, sifting through many more records than he did, eventually reached the same conclusions: these were the true goods.”
There’s also no satisfying term for what Smith did. Both “compiler” and “curator” feel too removed, too impersonal. Smith didn’t just corral a bunch of parts, he dreamed a whole. While I’ll admit to a tendency toward certain flights of sentimentality—and while I don’t want to discount either Smith’s intentionality or his authorship—I also don’t think it’s so preposterous to believe that these records were delivered to Smith for this precise purpose and that he ordered them as a poet orders words on a page, channeling, building meaning from nothing, becoming a physical conduit for a spiritual truth. That Smith understood how to place these records in useful dialogue is a function of his expertise and experience, but there is also a sense, here, of a story that needed telling. That’s not an unfamiliar feeling for most 78 collectors.
In The Old, Weird America, Greil Marcus calls the Anthology “an occult document disguised as an academic treatise on stylistic shifts within an archaic musicology.” I think that costume is essential to its premise; although it might seem counterintuitive, the illusion of authority allows the Anthology both its insularity and its limitations. Anyone who attempts to use it as an objective textbook—as the definitive, omnipotent document implied by its title—will be devastated by its shortcomings. It’s a wonky portrait of America at nearly all stages in its development. It contains no field recordings sourced from the Library of Congress or anywhere else and excludes entire communities of citizens, including Native Americans, immigrants, and (with a few exceptions) people who lived in the northern half of the United States. Per Smith’s vision, every track on the Anthology was professionally rendered and released, an oddly normative and antiacademic approach to something as intrinsically noncommercial as folk music. Smith clearly wanted to exalt the records people actually hunted down, bought, and cherished, just as he did.
While the Anthology isn’t comprehensive, it’s still a self-wrought universe with its own logic and revelations. It encourages—maybe even requi
res—its listeners to devise their own (personal, imperfect) explanations for how and why people sing. It’s all in here, Smith is saying, and if you can accept the Anthology on faith, as the sacred text he clearly envisioned, its world might open up to you, become your own.
Smith divided his eighty-four tracks into three categories, a kind of holy triumvirate: Social Music, Ballads, and Songs. All six records (two for each section) were collected under a cover illustration of a celestial monochord, an ancient, one-stringed instrument that vaguely resembles a mountain dulcimer. Here, the monochord is being tuned by the hand of God, which is stretching down from an illuminated cloud. The picture was drawn by the Belgian engraver Theodor de Bry and first published in Robert Fludd’s The History of the Macrocosm and the Microcosm sometime between 1617 and 1619. When properly played, the celestial monochord is supposed to unite the base elements of air, water, fire, and earth. The drawing is an allusion, certainly, to Smith and Fludd’s shared belief in serialization—in linking everything to everything else.
In the most basic sense, what Smith did with the Anthology will be familiar to anyone who has ever crafted or received a fussed-over mix tape from a paramour or a pal. As the rock critic Rob Sheffield wrote in his 2007 memoir, Love Is a Mix Tape, “It’s a fundamental human need to pass music around.” And of the mix tape, specifically: “There is always a reason to make one.” The idea, of course, is that music can be arranged in such a way that it communicates something new and vital—something impossible to say in any other way.
“The whole purpose is to have some kind of series of things,” Smith himself announced in a 1969 Sing Out! interview with John Cohen, and indeed, much of the Anthology’s lingering effect has been attributed to Smith’s sequencing. Previously, these tracks were islands, isolated platters of shellac that existed independently of anything else: even flipping over a 78 required disruptive action. Shifting the medium from the one-song-per-side 78 to the long-playing vinyl album allowed, finally, for songs to be juxtaposed in deliberate ways. It’s possible now, of course, to dump all eighty-four tracks onto one digital playlist and experience the entire Anthology uninterrupted, but I still prefer to acknowledge the demarcations between its three sections—to play it as Smith did.
The Anthology’s rubric was entirely Smith’s own. He deemed extramusical qualifiers (race, style, chronology) irrelevant, and rarely does the actual content of a song explain or justify its placement. Sometimes tracks by the same artist are lumped together; sometimes they’re not. Its blueprint isn’t obviously rendered or easily parsed, and the collection’s narrative, insomuch as one exists, is deliberately obscured. As such, the Anthology can feel like the musical equivalent of shouting cellar door, a phrase trumpeted for its ethereal beauty—it’s affecting in ways that have nothing to do with literal meaning. It can also be supremely frustrating. Like a good poem, nothing makes sense until everything makes sense.
“To me, what’s in plain sight is that the Anthology induces you to look for some underlying, organizing principle,” Kurt Gegenhuber, the author of my favorite Anthology-based website, The Celestial Monochord, offered. “To some, it may be natural to seek stories when looking for order, but the Anthology’s main effect is to seduce us into all sorts of hard, sense-making work. What I see as important is the way the cuts refuse to legibly lead to each other. Discontinuity and the lack of context seem to me crucial to the Anthology. Throughout, the MO is for each cut to just materialize out of some dark forest and float before you like a disembodied face, hang there for a few minutes, and then fade to black. And then that memory is dispersed by the next cut, which hypnotizes you all over again. The sequencing gives each cut a context of no context.”
That so much of this material is so strange (try to make literal or metaphoric sense of, say, Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground”), performed wildly and linked together according to some unspoken pedagogy, means the Anthology is disorienting long before it’s revelatory. I can only imagine what it sounded like sixty years ago. Gegenhuber, for one, believes that Smith inadvertently foresaw—or even created—the way people now listen to long-playing records, devouring them as whole texts and not just indiscriminate strings of songs. “You might say the Anthology was the first draft of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (or Highway 61 Revisited), since ‘listening’ to albums [now means] falling into very close ‘reading,’ ” he said.
The Anthology does contain a few concrete arcs to keep listeners grounded. Over the course of six LPs, for example, Smith slowly builds a not entirely surprising argument about the harshness and futility of work in the face of things like love and home. It culminates, for me, with Mississippi John Hurt’s generous, mesmeric performance of “Spike Driver Blues” on the final side of the final LP. Even now, the whole thing (from the Williamson Brothers and Curry’s “Gonna Die with a Hammer in My Hand” to the Carolina Tar Heels’ “Got the Farm Land Blues” to Uncle Dave Macon’s “Buddy Won’t You Roll Down the Line”) makes me panic that I and every gainfully employed person I know should actually be subscribing to some unsustainable hobo ethos. “Take this hammer and carry it to the captain, tell him I’m gone, tell him I’m gone,” Hurt sings, his voice eerily, tellingly placid. It’s a declaration of autonomy that also suggests a deep reordering of basic priorities. It’s fearless, and I can’t think of another musical moment that makes me want to kick my laptop out a window more. When I first heard about a friend who quit her office job via petulant Post-it—“I’m outta here,” she scrawled, affixing the note to her computer, a bold if indulgent decree—my first thought was how proud Harry Smith would be.
Elsewhere, there are clear lessons about love and fidelity and revenge. There is an extraordinary amount of bad behavior. It turns out people have always been doing the same ugly and beautiful things to each other. Nearly any emotion you can imagine feeling—lust, contempt, rage, satisfaction, jealousy, love, loneliness, joy, exhaustion, guilt, unbearable sadness—is articulated and slotted onto Smith’s continuum.
It’s impossible for me to believe that Smith, who fancied himself a bit of an alchemist, didn’t engineer this thing specifically for those sorts of reactions. Ultimately, the Anthology is about sewing together self-made worlds—establishing a supernarrative of the human condition. I understand how that might sound absurd. An eccentric, possibly hallucinating twenty-nine-year-old pawing through a pile of records and deciding which ones and in what order they should play isn’t exactly comparable, say, to Albert Einstein defining relativity. But Smith’s role in the creation of the Anthology did reposition the collector, rather than the critic or scholar, as an architect of canons, an arbiter, a storyteller. He sussed a narrative from incongruous parts and presented it as an edifying fable. Practically, there is a parallel, certainly, to the songs contained therein, which are often based, at least in part, on other songs—a new work from old work, a tapestry from string.
It’s not unusual, then, for the Anthology to elicit a dramatic response. “I’ve met dozens of people who heard the Anthology and ran off to join some circus or other,” Gegenhuber said. “For [folklorists and musicians like] Mike Seeger, John Cohen, and many others, the response was to learn to play, yourself, its songs and styles, and go looking for Boggs, Ashley, Hurt, et cetera. For still others, the Anthology induced the record-collecting response, which seems to be about sense making.”
Accordingly, even otherwise-reasonable authors go a little loopy when writing about the Anthology’s inexplicable allure. In When We Were Good, Robert Cantwell’s treatise on the folk revival, he describes it as “strange, even sinister: a closet-like enclosure from which the world is shut out, spangled with occult symbols whose meaning we have not yet learned, fitted to an obscure design or purpose and harboring a vague threat, like the gypsy’s tent or the funhouse, that by some unknown force will subject us to an ordeal over which we have no control and which will leave us permanently marked.” (Yikes!) Marcus, meanwhile, conjures a place
called Smithville, and in describing the first side of Songs, writes: “The streets of Smithville have been rolled up, and the town now offers that quintessential American experience, the ultimate, permanent test of the unfinished American, Puritan, or pioneer, loose in a land of pitfalls and surprises: Step right up, Ladies and Gentlemen! Enter the New Sensorium of Old-Time Music, and feel the ground pulled right out from under your feet!”
I understand—deeply—the impulse toward hyperbole, the desire to speak of the Anthology as a contained spiritual experience that incites certain epiphanies. It is, after all, a thing you can inhabit if you want to: there are alehouses to drink in and Stetson hats to bicker over and corn to hoe and people to marry and love and betray and maybe murder.
Then there’s Smith, a welcome little Virgil, typing his short, all-caps headline-style summaries (they are stylistically reminiscent, at times, of the descriptions included in Lomax’s “List of American Folk Songs on Commercial Records”) that mostly make me snicker but occasionally make me gulp. Like the synopsis he cobbled together for Rev. F. W. McGee’s “Fifty Miles of Elbow Room,” a spastic, lyrically unintelligible gospel song that I think is about heaven, or at least some heavenly analog (it appears to be based on the New Jerusalem as seen by John in Revelation 21:9): “WHEN GATES WIDE ON OTHER SIDE ROOM FOR YOU, ME. FOUR SQUARE CITY, JASPER WALLS, LIMITS 1200 MILES. ON RIGHT HAND, ON LEFT HAND 50 MILES ELBOW ROOM.” It’s Smith reducing a song to its weird essence—to the best, most universal truth contained therein.
At the very least, the Anthology contextualized—if not accelerated—the folk revival of the 1950s and ’60s, coaching new fans about the genre’s recorded precedents. The songs Smith included may have only been twenty to twenty-five years old, but they were hardly accessible (or even known) to noncollectors in 1952. Now, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, it seems deeply bizarre to think that cultural artifacts could become extinct so quickly (for example, in 2011 I heard Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’,” a song first released thirty years before, approximately eight thousand times without trying), but the bulk of these tracks were either half forgotten or entirely unheard of by the time Smith polished them up for rerelease. In a 1993 interview with the music producer Hal Willner, Ginsberg called the Anthology a “historic bomb in American folk music,” claiming that “it turned on Peter Paul and Mary, turned on the whole folk music world at that time, including Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and everyone else, because it was this treasure of American blues [and] mountain musics. Happy Traum, everybody, including Dylan, [were] affected by it up to Jerry Garcia, who learned blues from Harry Smith’s records.”
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