Anthology of American Folk Music is a three-album collection, released in 1952 by Folkways Records, of eighty-four recordings of American folk, blues and country music made and issued from 1926 to 1933 by a variety of performers. The album was compiled from the experimental film maker Harry Smith's own personal collection of 78 rpm records.
Harry Smith was a West Coast filmmaker, magickian and bohemian eccentric.[5] As a teenager he started collecting old blues, jazz, country, Cajun, and gospel records and accumulated a large collection of 78s,[6] those being the only medium at the time.
In 1947, he met with Moses Asch, with an interest in selling or licensing the collection to Asch's label, Folkways Records.[7] Smith wrote that he selected recordings from between "1927, when electronic recording made possible accurate music reproduction, and 1932, when the Great Depression halted folk music sales."[8] When the Anthology was released, neither Folkways nor Smith possessed the licensing rights to these recordings, many of which had initially been issued by record companies that were still in existence, including Columbia and Paramount. The anthology thus technically qualifies as a high profile bootleg. Folkways would later obtain some licensing rights, although the Anthology would not be completely licensed until the 1997 Smithsonian reissue.[9] Asch had a "reputation for releasing copyrighted songs without going through the proper legal channels."[10]
Smith divided the collection into three, two record volumes: Ballads,Social Music, and Songs. The first volume consists of ballads including many American versions of Child Ballads taken from the English folk tradition. Each song tells a story about a specific event or time, and Smith may have made some effort to organize them to suggest a historical narrative, a theory suggested by the fact that many of the first songs in this volume are old English folk ballads while the closing songs deal with the hardships of being a farmer in the 1920s.
The first record in the Social Music volume mostly consists of music that was likely performed at social gatherings and dances with many of the songs being instrumentals. The second record in the volume consists of religious and spiritual songs, including some Gospel songs.
The volume of Songs consists of regular songs, dealing with everyday life. Critic Greil Marcus describes them as being about "marriage, labor, dissipation, prison, and death."[11]
Smith's booklet in the original release refers to three additionally planned volumes made up of music up until 1950.[8] Although none were released during his lifetime, a fourth volume was released posthumously in 2000.[12] Entitled Labor Songs, this volume centers around work songs and union songs. The album contains later material then the original three volumes, anthologizing material recorded as late as 1940.
Design
Example from Smith's Liner Notes: #57 – The Coo Coo Bird
Smith himself designed and edited the anthology and wrote the liner notes, which are almost as well known as the music, using an unusual fragmented, collage method that presaged some postmodern artwork. He also penned short synopses of the songs which read like newspaper headlines. For the song "King Kong Kitchie Kitchie Ki-Me-O" by Chubby Parker, a song about a mouse marrying a frog, Smith notes: "Zoologic Miscegeny Achieved in Mouse Frog Nuptials, Relatives Approve."[13]
Each of the three sets carries the same cover art, a Theodore de Bry etching of an instrument Smith referred to as the Celestial Monochord,[14] taken from a mystical treatise by scientist/alchemistRobert Fludd. The etching is printed over a different color background for each volume of the set: blue, red and green. Smith incorporated both the music and the art into his own unusual cosmology. He considered each of these colors as corresponding to an alchemical classical element: water, fire, and air, respectively. The fourth Labour volume (released later by Revenant) is colored yellow to represent the element earth.
Release and reissues
Cover for 1960s reissue Folkways FA 2951, featuring a poor Depression-era farmer
Folkways originally released the Anthology as three double-LP boxed sets on August 9, 1952.[15] It sold relatively poorly initially. By 1953, Folkways had sold only fifty albums, forty-seven of which went to libraries and colleges and for a time, it was out of print because of copyright issues.[10]
One of the first notable reissues was in the 1960s, released as three individual volumes like the original release. Irwin Silber replaced Smith's covers with a Ben Shahn photograph of a poor Depression-era farmer, over Smith's objections, although others considered this a wise commercial choice in the politically charged atmosphere of the times .[16]
In 2020, Dust-to-Digital released a compilation containing the B-sides of the records included on the Anthology entitled The Harry Smith B-Sides. Some songs were not included due to the racist or offensive nature of the lyrics,[19] which drew criticism from reviewers.[20]
Writing for AllMusic, critic John Bush wrote the compilation "could well be the most influential document of the '50s folk revival. Many of the recordings that appeared on it had languished in obscurity for 20 years, and it proved a revelation to a new group of folkies, from Pete Seeger to John Fahey to Bob Dylan... Many of the most interesting selections on the Anthology, however, are taken from [obscure] artists... such as Clarence Ashley, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, and Buell Kazee."[21] In his review for The Village Voice, music critic Robert Christgau wrote "Harry Smith's act of history... aces two very '90s concepts: the canon that accrues as rock gathers commentary, and the compilations that multiply as labels recycle catalogue. In its time, it wrested the idea of the folk from ideologues and ethnomusicologists by imagining a commercial music of everyday pleasure and alienation—which might as well have been conceived to merge with a rock and roll that didn't yet exist... Somebody you know is worth the 60 bucks it'll run you. So are you."[27]Jon Pareles, writing in The New York Times, said that the songs "still sound marvelous and uncanny."[28]
Though relatively little was written about the Anthology during the first years after it was released (the first known press reference to the collection was in the folk music magazine Sing Out! in 1958, which focused on Clarence Ashley’s "The Coo Coo") [33] musicians and writers tell of how much of an impact it had on them at the time.[34] The music in the collection provided direct inspiration to much of the emerging folk music revival movement. The anthology made available music which was previously largely heard only in marginalized social and economic groups. Many people who first heard this music through the Anthology came from very different cultural and economic backgrounds than its original creators and listeners. Many previously obscure songs became standards at hootenannies and in folk clubs and coffee houses because they were in the Anthology. Some of the musicians represented in the Anthology had their musical careers revived. Some made additional recordings and live appearances. The collection brought the works of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Mississippi John Hurt, Dick Justice and many others to the attention of musicians such as The New Lost City Ramblers, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. The Harry Smith Anthology, as some call it, was the folk music Bible during the late 1950s and 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene. As the liner notes to the 1997 reissue say, musician Dave van Ronk had earlier commented that "We all knew every word of every song on it, including the ones we hated."[35]
The Anthology has had major historical influence. Smith's method of sequencing tracks along with his inventive liner notes called attention to the set.[36] This reintroduction of nearly forgotten popular styles of rural American music to new listeners had impact on American ethnomusicology and was directly and indirectly influential on the American folk music revival.[37]
Sing Out! published a full article on the entire set in 1969.[33]
In surveying the critical writing on the Anthology, Rory Crutchfield writes, "[t]his is one of the strangest aspects of the critical heritage of the Anthology: its emergence from relative obscurity to prominence as a revivalist manifesto without much transition. In terms of academic credibility, this partly came from the work of [Robert] Cantwell and [Greil] Marcus, which was published fairly close to the reissue of the collection."[38]
^Asch, Moses. "The Birth and Growth of the Anthology of American Folk Music," liner note essay. Anthology of American Folk Music, 1997 reissue, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings
^ abSmith, Harry. "Foreword," liner note essay. Anthology of American Folk Music, 1952 edition, Folkways Records.
^"Notes on Harry Smith's Anthology," liner note essay. Anthology of American Folk Music, 1997 reissue, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.
^Melzer, Arthur M.; Weinberger, Jerry; Zinman, M. Richard, eds. (1999). Democracy & the Arts. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. p. 197 n. 2. ISBN9780801435416. Retrieved 2020-09-07. In the context of the time, when folk music was linked to protest, specifically to the civil rights movement and the 'national shame' of Appalachian poverty ... it was a smart commercial move.
^"Review: Anthology of American Folk Music". Rolling Stone. New York. September 18, 1997. pp. 101–2. 5 Stars (out of 5) – ...it is impossible to overstate the historic worth, sociocultural impact and undiminished vitality of the music in this set, and of Smith's idiosyncratic scholarship and instinctive wisdom....a bedrock of our national musical identity...
^ abKatherine Skinner (Jan 2006). "'Must Be Born Again': Resurrecting the 'Anthology of American Folk Music'". Popular Music. 25 (1). Cambridge University Press: 61. JSTOR3877543.
^Katherine Skinner (Jan 2006). "'Must Be Born Again': Resurrecting the 'Anthology of American Folk Music'". Popular Music. 25 (1). Cambridge University Press: 60. JSTOR3877543.
^Marcus, Greil. "The Old, Weird America," liner note essay. Anthology of American Folk Music, 1997 reissue, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.
