The body count begins with the first song “Henry Lee” where a woman murders her fiance by stabbing him with a penknife then hides the body by dumping it down a well. From there things get more ominous as children play ball and die, women cheat on their drunk husbands, great ships sink, crops go bad, jobs are lost to technology, presidents get assassinated, husbands are lost at sea and all seems lost. Nevertheless, life goes on and it’s time to party, but don’t get too carried away because the Lord is watching and he shall take account. God and the devil never stray too far from earthly events so go about your business with an eye above and below while still trying to move forward. It’s exhausting, it’s exhilarating and when it’s all done, how ‘bout just going fishing? Beyond the obvious connections created by the titles of the volumes, it is possible to consider the songs together as a long monologue on the human condition, a radio show featuring subtle transitions from song to song based on subject matter, instrumentation, musical style, or lyrical content. One aspect of the music that Harry explicitly sought to obscure was race. American music has always drawn heavily from any available source without regard to race or ethnicity, yet when the music industry began to grow in the early part of the twentieth century, rather than reflect the reality of the varied origins of American music and taste, marketing directors decided to follow the strictures of American prejudice and created categories designed to sell to specific groups rather than appeal to all. In The Anthology Harry ignored such artificial categories as race and instead grouped his collection according to universal human experience. His original booklet makes very few references to the race of the performers, allowing the listener to see only a handful of pictures of the artists themselves. In this way, the content of the music rather than the color of skin becomes the primary basis for appreciating the songs. Harry claimed with delight that professional music critics often had a hard time telling which performers were black and which white.
It takes a few listens to get passed the age of the recordings (which have been cleaned to nearly pristine condition but still sound old). After that, as you become familiar with them, the songs will get under your skin. Nevertheless, they still sound odd and if you didn’t know any better, it’d be very hard in today’s world of pristine pop to imagine that these were not rare or unusual recordings for their time, but rather standard, commercial material. To be sure, the audience for these records was mostly regional but they were in fact released on the era’s equivalent of the major labels. And that is another interesting aspect of the collection, at least as originally released —- it was essentially a bootleg. The omissions of accreditation have been rectified with the CD reissue.
Though precise numbers are difficult to come by, the original collection probably never sold more than a few thousand copies but the impact it had can be assessed. Quite simply, The Anthology of American Folk Music has been called “the founding document of the folk music revival of the 1950s and 60s.” Following the sex scandals, untimely deaths, and Elvis drafting that ripped the heart out of rock and roll in the late 50s, aspiring musicians sought out folk music as the new arena for their youthful expressiveness. Beginning with the apparently safe sound of the Kingston Trio and their enormous hit “Tom Dooley” (not as safe as it sounded since it was, after all, about a murder) and the rebellious political messages of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and the Weavers, many of the players eventually had The Anthology loaned to them.
It seemed that The Anthology came not just from another era, but another planet. Nothing here sounded anything like what young folkies had been playing. Despite the fact that the songs were no more than 25-30 years old, they seemed ancient beyond recognition. The children of the 50s folk revival had been raised in the new suburban landscape. Their parents had experienced the deprivation of Depression and the devastation of world war and had done all they could to shelter their children from the horrors of their lives. But lingering over it all was the sense of impending annihilation from nuclear holocaust made that could be made real in an instant from a Cold War turned hot. In the midst of this scenario, The Anthology landed like a Rosetta Stone, an instruction manual on how to deal with life’s hardships through song. For a group within a generation that felt somehow cut off from the wisdom of the past, here was a source of information that said it was ok to acknowledge difficulty and pain, to express joy without fear of consequences, to tell real stories through music.
Soon, any musician worth their salt would have to demonstrate their ability to play and interpret many of the songs contained on The Anthology. Many of the well-known artists of the era have acknowledged their debt to Harry and The Anthology. Among those luminaries: Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter, Roger McGuinn to name a few. At Garcia’s insistence, the Grateful Dead’s Rex Foundation provided the perpetually derelict Harry with grants of $10,000 a year for each of the last three years of his life because of the significance of Harry’s work as the source of the Dead’s inspiration. To this day, members of the Dead play their interpretations of songs first found on The Anthology, among them “Minglewood Blues,” and “KC Moan.” When Dylan released his acoustic albums Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong, each contained his version of songs from The Anthology.
Harry’s influence didn’t end with the initial release of The Anthology. He remained a seminal figure in avant-garde animated cinema, producing approximately seventeen films of obscure imagery and meticulous technique. He continued to seek out living artifacts of American Indian culture, collecting Seminole artwork, and recording Kiowa Indian songs, stories, and dance. He recorded albums featuring 60s rebel rock band The Fugs and an album of songs written and performed by poet Allen Ginsberg called First Blues. The design of three interlocking fish that appears on several of Ginsberg’s poetry anthologies was Harry’s In his last years, Harry lectured occasionally at the Naropa Institute, a Buddhist inspired arts and literature college in Boulder, Colorado where he had the title Shaman in Residence.
Currently efforts are underway to preserve the work and legacy of Harry Smith of which The Anthology has been the most visible. The Harry Smith Archives, The Iota Center, and Anthology Film Archives are working to restore Harry’s films, assorted artworks, and wide ranging archival collections of everything from Ukrainian Easter eggs, to Seminole patchwork quilt designs, to cat’s cradle-type string figures from around the world. To promote Harry’s work and help finance the restoration projects, a symposium and series of concerts will be taking place in Los Angeles in April, 2001. These will be the third series of concerts following successful shows in London and New York City in 1999. Other shows may be planned in the future. For more information on Harry and the shows, past and present, see HS Archives link below.
From a casual glance, the subjects covered by Harry Smith in his work, as impressive and wide-ranging as they obviously are, might also seem hopelessly random, even chaotic. A close look, however, reveals a solid thread connecting them all. The universe is made of a finite amount of stuff and everything in the universe is made of the same stuff, constantly interchanging in form, but never in essential content. No matter what exists in nature or is created or imagined by mankind, it all comes from the same stuff and resonates with the same vibration. As cosmic or mystical as that may sound, it is the most basic of all possible understandings. Because it is so basic, we usually miss it in the other noise of our lives and have lost touch with it in our spiritual lives, especially in the modern practice of western religious traditions. Through the contemplation of art or the participation in culture, especially music, Harry saw that it was easier to remind us of what we all share in common and sought to locate examples of it through all forms of human expression and existence in creation.
No Comments comments associated with this post