Do Not Sell At Any Price

by Amanda Petrusich

  By the mid-1980s, Smith was living in a flophouse on the Bowery, intermittently boozing himself into comas. He was toothless save a few decayed, abscess-ridden molars, and because of an injury sustained while ripping a feeding tube out of his mouth (after one particularly gnarly drinking binge, he’d ended up in St. Vincent’s hospital, connected to a cornucopia of machines), he could eat only pea soup and mashed bananas, and not, apparently, without a good deal of gurgling. Prior to his arrival on the Bowery, he’d been shacked up in a tiny, book-stuffed room at the Hotel Breslin on Twenty-Ninth Street and Broadway, then home to the indigent elderly and the welfare bound, now repurposed as the modish Ace Hotel. (Its popular restaurant—I mean gastropub—presently serves a twenty-one-dollar hamburger; model types with expensive laptops are often draped around the lobby.) According to Ginsberg, the scene there was such: “And in the bathroom he had a little birdie that he fed and talked to and let out of his cage all the time. And when his little birds died he put their bodies in the freezer. He’d keep them for various Alchemical purposes, along with a bottle which he said was several years’ deposits of his semen, which he was also using for whatever magic structures.”

  In 1988, Ginsberg helped bring Smith to the Naropa Institute, where Smith studied and lectured and cleaned up a bit: he quit drinking (he still self-medicated freely, smoking weed and ingesting, as Rani Singh writes in “Harry Smith, an Ethnographic Modernist in America,” “whatever combination of Sinequan and Valium he found in his jacket pocket”) and began aggressively chronicling found sounds (church bells, children jumping rope, cows). He gained thirty invigorating pounds on an ambitious diet of bee pollen, raw hamburger, ice cream, instant coffee, and Ensure. He lived and worked in a cabin with an index card—DO NOT DISTURB, I AM EITHER SLEEPING OR WORKING—posted semipermanently to the front door. Singh, who first met Smith while she was studying with Ginsberg at Naropa, called his years in Colorado “relatively tranquil.”

  For someone so invested in interdependencies, there’s little evidence of Smith sustaining a significant romantic relationship in his lifetime. Singh described him as asexual. “I just think that he was more of an intellect. He lived in his head more than in his body,” she said. He was also a relentless hustler, prone to harrowing fits of rage, and particular about his habits and beliefs. In “The Alchemical Image” (which originally appeared in the catalog for “The Heavenly Tree Grows Downward,” a 2002 exhibition of Smith’s selected visual works), the curator Raymond Foye wrote: “The cardinal rule in listening to records with Harry was NO TALKING. Absolutely none, whatsoever, until the record was finished. Hanging out with Harry was always characterized by a mixture of pleasure and fear. Several of his visitors were unstable, armed, and dangerous, and Harry’s anger could clear a room. A gouache that took three painstaking weeks to complete might be torn up in a flash. There were always his sudden mood swings, and, of course, his drinking.”

  By the time Smith ended up back at the Chelsea, in 1990, he was living on food stamps and Social Security and a yearly donation from Jerry Garcia, who had publicly declared the Anthology the primary source of his understanding of the blues (the Grateful Dead frequently performed songs from the collection). One day, according to Ginsberg, Smith said, “I am dying,” threw up blood, and fell over. His body was taken to the morgue at St. Vincent’s, where Ginsberg later “pulled him out of the wall on this giant drawer. His face was somewhat twisted up, there was a little blood on his whitish beard. So I sat and did the traditional Tibetan liturgy, refuge liturgy, and then spent an hour meditating.”

  Like James McKune’s ill-fated 78s, no one knows exactly what happened to Harry Smith’s record collection. At some point Smith donated a good portion of it to the New York Public Library, where it was eventually integrated into the general collection. Before its absorption, it was cataloged and stealthily taped by the musicians and folklorists Ralph Rinzler and Mike Seeger. In Music from the True Vine, his biography of Seeger, Bill Malone describes how, in 1956, Rinzler and Seeger taped “hundreds of 78 rpm records from Harry Smith’s unrecorded collection . . . Working as volunteers, Ralph cataloged over 1,000 records on three-by-five cards while Mike recorded his favorites on his reel-to-reel recording machine. When told to cease his recording, Mike then smuggled out scores of records in a suitcase—including many highly choice items from the Columbia and RCA Victor catalogs—which he then taped at Ralph’s home in Passaic [New Jersey].” In a 2007 interview with Ray Allen, Seeger recalled their caper: “That evening we went out with my tape recorder and the box [of records]. So the guard at the door said, ‘Oh, I want to look at the box.’ So Ralph went into kind of like a frenzied dance, looking for a card or something to show him. So he got the guard, who was like this 60-year-old, like a cop doing his retirement, so flustered and confused, and I just walked out with the box.” The pilfered recordings were dutifully returned the next day, but their bootlegged tapes were passed around folk circles for years like a talisman, or a secret.

  Moe Asch eventually bought or otherwise obtained whatever records Smith didn’t give to the library. They were similarly assimilated into the Folkways archive and became the property of the Smithsonian in 1986, after Asch died and his family coordinated the institution’s acquisition of the label (the Smithsonian agreed to keep all 2,168 Folkways titles, including the Anthology, in print indefinitely). According to Folkways archivist Jeff Place, they still have “a few thousand” of Smith’s records “mixed in with the rest of the 78 library,” but when they began work on the reissue in the late 1990s, they could only locate one of the 78s—Bill and Belle Reed’s “Old Lady and the Devil”—that Smith had used to source the Anthology. “We had to go find the rest,” Place said, which meant knocking on collectors’ doors (records were borrowed from Joe Bussard, Dick Spottswood, Don Kent, and Dave Freeman) or, in some cases, reusing the original master tapes Asch and Smith made of the Anthology prior to its release.

  Although that seems pat enough—Smith’s collection was broken up and deserialized, sure, but it was relocated to two relatively safe places—the story of what actually happened to his 78s still gets muttered between collectors as a warning, an illuminating parable with a worrying end. Chris King was the first to tell it to me. “By the time [Smith] had basically exhausted his mental faculties or his ability to manage his collection, he had amassed over thirteen thousand 78s, which would be a lot of hillbilly, a lot of blues, and a lot of ethnic music,” King explained. At some point, well after Smith had submitted the bulk of his records to the library for safekeeping, Richard Nevins had received a call to purchase a few Fiddlin’ John Carson records plucked directly from Smith’s collection and marked as such. But how had they become separated from everything else? King heard that the library had junked most of Smith’s donation. “Deacquisitioned. It was all put in a Dumpster and destroyed.” He shrugged. “So basically thirteen thousand 78s and a man’s life—just snuffed away, just like that, in a Dumpster.”

  When I e-mailed Nevins to see what he knew, he was more optimistic about the collection’s fate: “As far as I know, the collection never left the NY library and should still be there—but it was at their Lincoln Center musical branch. I have about four or five 12″ 78s from Harry’s collection that I got from [the collector] Eugene Earle—don’t know why they were separated. The bottom line, though, is who cares where the collection is at—there’s little or anything in it that doesn’t reside in many other collections. It was Harry’s insight and good taste as an LP compiler that was special, not his actual collection.”

  Nevins was right, of course, but I was still curious. I figured there was no way anyone could know exactly which records Smith had amassed over all that time, especially if his collection was as monstrous and diverse as many people claimed it was. It seemed plausible that, given Smith’s pedigree as a listener, his collection could have contained any number of unheralded masterpieces. My nosiness manifested as a flurry of correspondence: first, I wrote to the folkloris
t and filmmaker John Cohen to see if he had a list of the records Seeger and Rinzler had recorded and cataloged (I knew he still owned a copy of the reel-to-reel tapes they’d made), so I could at least see if the library had copies of those songs. I sent a similar e-mail to Steve Weiss at the Southern Folklife Collection, which acquired Mike Seeger’s papers in 1991 (Seeger died in Lexington, Virginia, in 2009, at age seventy-six), and another to Place at the Folkways office, which holds Rinzler’s (Rinzler died in Washington, DC, in 1994, a few days shy of his sixtieth birthday). Although neither collection had been cataloged for research yet, Weiss and Place both told me I was welcome to sort through their physical archives—to look for a list, for a rogue stack of yellowing index cards, for a record—if I thought it might help. I did: I wanted, badly, to know what Seeger and Rinzler knew, to hear what they’d heard. Seeger’s widow, Alexia Smith, told me the pair had even considered putting together a companion to the Anthology based on the rest of Smith’s collection. “Near the end of Ralph’s life, he and Mike made a selection of cuts from these tapes—songs and tunes not included in Smith’s Anthology—for a CD, which never got made,” she wrote. “I’m aghast to think Harry Smith’s record collection may have been ‘integrated’ or sold.”

  I also contacted my source at the New York Public Library, a publicist named Jonathan Pace whom I’d worked with on a few library-related stories for the New York Times. Pace referred me to Jonathan Hiam, curator of the American Music Collection at the Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, who offered to give me a private tour of the recordings archive. Within minutes of receiving his e-mail, I began imagining the grand moral dilemma I’d face when, alone in some unswept corner—having descended an obscured, rickety staircase to an unmarked catacomb deep below Sixty-Fifth Street, insulated from the day tourists thronging Damrosch Park and lit by the orange flush of a single Edison bulb—I discovered a stack of unheard Smith-owned 78s in a crumbling cardboard box. Would I stuff them into my backpack and climb out the bathroom window? It would be a noble reclamation. Possibly even heroic.

  I also sent a note to John Mhiripiri, the director of the Anthology Film Archives; I knew they had ended up with a rogue box of Smith’s paper airplanes, and I reasoned there might be some other pieces there, too. “Anthology has been storing the bulk of Harry Smith’s collections since his materials were packed, labeled, etc., following his death in 1991. This includes one box of his paper airplane collection (in addition to the many books, records, Ukrainian Easter eggs, string figures, etc),” Mhiripiri replied. “The collections are mostly in off-site storage, however I am open to making the airplanes available for you to view, provided that Rani [Singh] agrees, there is no super-urgent deadline, and that it could be done within a specific timeframe, ideally not exceeding an hour.” I accepted his conditions and forwarded consent from Singh. Mhiripiri told me to call him again in two weeks.

  I had a research stake in untangling Smith’s material legacy, but I was also becoming dangerously interested in just getting my hands on some of his stuff, which had started to seem like the most obvious way to discern any useful information about his life and work. Besides, it irked me the way Smith’s records were strewn about, lodged in random, private enclaves, estranged. I saw myself battling back a classic collector urge: the desire to gather and serialize. To position everything in relation to everything else. To slot like among like. To write a story.

  I met Jonathan Hiam at the security desk of the performing arts library on an especially glaring Monday morning. He led me downstairs to the archive. The New York Public Library’s record collection is not, it turns out, stored in a damp, underground tomb, but is organized by label on big, white rolling shelves in a fluorescent-lit and well-ventilated basement. While we wandered through the collection, I resisted the urge to throw my jacket on the ground and start pulling 78s from the shelves, chucking their paper sleeves into the air, like a chimpanzee devouring a pile of ripe bananas. I wanted to hear everything, immediately.

  Hiam told me he’d been looking into the acquisition of Smith’s collection, but that the library’s early donation records had been inconsistently kept. Now the process is streamlined and well documented, but it wasn’t always: records came in and they were put on the shelf. Maybe a carbon copy of an acceptance note was slotted into a folder somewhere, maybe not. For some reason, Hiam said, there was virtually no information about music donated between 1958 and 1968. Smith’s 78s may or may not have been marked with his initials. The library likely sent Smith a letter of receipt, and someone probably filed a copy of it somewhere (which would provide at least a date and the size of the donation; Hiam thought it was unlikely it would be itemized), but finding it would take some time. He promised me he’d try.

  The library’s several hundred thousand 78s aren’t technically in circulation—you can’t check one out and tote it home—but patrons can request to hear whatever they want while they’re in the building. The retrieval process is delightfully weird, and after I’d browsed the contents of the archive with Hiam, I was keyed up to try it. Per Hiam’s instructions, I located the lone microfiche machine on the second floor, which is positioned behind the reference librarian’s desk and requires the rather brazen unhooking of a temporary railing to access. There, I thumbed through a Rolodex, compiled in 1985, of purple microfiche negatives listing the library’s archived records (“You might be one of three women who have sat here,” Hiam snickered after he spotted me settling in). I picked a random track from the Anthology—Chubby Parker’s “King Kong Kitchie Kitchie Ki-Me-O,” a whistle-heavy novelty song from 1928—found the appropriate slide (they’re organized alphabetically by performer), and slid it into the base of the Micron 780A (a gray, boxy machine that incites brief, Proustian flashbacks to 1989). After wiggling the reader around for a bit, I found an entry for the record, complete with matrix and serial numbers. I wondered, immediately, if this was Smith’s copy—the ur-copy, as it were, maybe even with a tiny “H.E.S.” carved into the label!—and eagerly filled out a paper slip, pressing hard enough to ensure the carbon copy was legible. I rode the elevator back up to the third floor and tentatively handed it to the clerk at the A/V playback desk. He told me to take a seat. “This might take a while,” he warned.

  “Like ten minutes?” I ventured.

  “Maybe more than ten minutes.”

  Once the slip is submitted, a call is placed to a librarian in the basement, who rises from his or her desk and starts scouring the shelves. Because the microfiche hasn’t been updated since 1985, and because these records are so infrequently accessed (some have likely remained untouched since their acquisition), this process can be vexing. Records aren’t always where they’re supposed to be. When the requested 78 is finally located, it’s carried to a dark, studio-like room where an audio engineer places it on a turntable, makes any necessary adjustments (changing the speed, weighting the tone arm, equalizing the playback), and pipes it upstairs to the waiting patron, who sits in an ergonomic office chair and listens on a cushy pair of studio headphones.

  I waited a while, fiddling with the buttons of my coat. I watched a boneless old man in an oversize blazer repeatedly fall asleep and startle awake: tipping to the right, popping back up, drooping left, up. Every few minutes, the A/V clerk trudged over and told me they were working on it. Hiam appeared, smiled, and apologized. After forty-five minutes, I started to feel a little guilty. I had a perfectly playable CD of “King Kong Kitchie Kitchie Ki-Me-O” at home. I also had an MP3 of the song on the iPhone shoved in the back pocket of my jeans. I owned two physical copies of the Anthology. Besides, this particular 78 might not actually be Smith’s, and even if it were, I wouldn’t be able to touch it, and besides, what exactly did I think I was going to learn by listening to it this way? I told the A/V clerk that it was okay, I’d come back another time. “We have to find it anyway,” he said.

  “I know,” I answered.

  I took the elevator back down to Lincoln Center. A guard
searched my bag on the way out. All he uncovered was a half-eaten granola bar.

  I realized fairly quickly that flying south to claw around for Ralph Rinzler’s index cards and Mike Seeger’s bootleg tapes was a useless errand. I told a lot of people not to worry about it, and nearly all of them appeared relieved. I no longer knew why I was so preoccupied with gathering or in any other way quantifying Harry Smith’s 78s—what I thought they could tell me about music or art or humankind, how I thought they might augment or guide my own experience of collecting.

  My prying did yield one interesting footnote. The New York Public Library presently holds an uncataloged copy of the Cincinnati Jug Band’s “Newport Blues,” an instrumental cut recorded for Paramount in 1929 and included on the second disc of the Anthology. I only learned of its existence after spotting it in a display case at an NYPL event, and gasping. Hiam helped me arrange to have an archival transfer of the record sent to Chris King, who had previously suggested that he could listen to a good transfer, compare it to his original first-pressing LPs of the Anthology, and tell me if the NYPL’s copy was, in fact, the source copy—if it had “Smith’s DNA on it,” as he put it. A few days after he received the CD from the library, King sent me a note. “I’m very certain that the copy of ‘Newport Blues’ (PMT-12743/21100-2) that was used on Smith’s collection (from the original first pressing of the LP set, Vol. 2 Social Music, Dances No. 2, Band 40) is the same copy that is held in the NYPL,” he wrote. “The main evidence is that on the CD transfer, there is a rather predictable non-musical artifact found at thirty-five seconds, forty-one seconds, forty-two seconds, and forty-three seconds that corresponds identically with a more muted non-musical artifact found at the same time spreads on Smith’s track. This non-musical artifact is above the frequency range of the normal ambient surface noise that an N-Paramount of this time period would have. I think it must be a pressing bubble or other defect in the shellac pressing, possibly caused by the use of ground up chairs or bovine bones, maybe both.”