Anthology of American Folk Music

Anthology of American Folk Music
Compilation album by Various Artists
Released	1952
Recorded	1926-1933
Genre	Country, folk, blues
Length	252:50
Label	Folkways
Producer	Harry Smith
Anthology of American Folk Music chronology
Anthology of American Folk Music (1952) Anthology of American Folk Music, Vol. 4 (2000)

The Anthology of American Folk Music is a six-album compilation released in 1952 by Folkways Records (catalogue FP 251, FP 252, and FP 253), comprising eighty-four American folk, blues and country music recordings that were originally issued from 1927 to 1932.

Experimental filmmaker Harry Smith compiled the music from his personal collection of 78 rpm records. The album is famous due to its role as a touchstone for the American folk music revival in the 1950s and 1960s. The Anthology was released for compact disc by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings on August 19, 1997.

Compilation and release[edit]

Harry Smith was a West Coast filmmaker, bohemian, and eccentric, who, around 1940, developed a hobby of collecting old blues, jazz, country, Cajun, and gospel records, 78s being the only medium at the time. While mainstream America often considered these records to be ephemeral, he took them seriously and accumulated a collection of several thousand recordings, and over time began to develop an interest in seeing them preserved and curated.

In 1947, he met with Moses Asch, with an interest in selling or licensing the collection to Asch's label, Folkways Records.^[1] Smith wrote that he selected recordings from between "1927, when electronic recording made possible accurate music reproduction, and 1932, when the Depression halted folk music sales."^[2] 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.^[3]

Sequencing[edit]

The compilation was divided by Smith into three two-album volumes: "Ballads", "Social Music", and "Songs." As the title indicates, the "Ballads" volume consists of ballads, including many American versions of Child ballads originating 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 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 of the volume deal with the hardships of being a farmer in the 1920s.

The first album in the "social music" volume largely consists of music likely performed at social gatherings or dances. Many of the songs are instrumentals. The second album in the "Social Music" volume consists of religious and spiritual songs. The third "Songs" volume consists of regular songs, dealing with everyday life: critic Greil Marcus describes its thematic interests as being "marriage, labor, dissipation, prison, and death."^[4]

Smith's booklet in the original release makes reference to three additional planned volumes in the series, which would anthologize music up until 1950.^[2] In 2000, Revenant Records worked with the Harry Smith Archive to recreate and release a fourth volume, organized around a theme of "work" and entitled "Labor Songs." It includes a selection of union songs, and anthologizes material released as late as 1940.

Design[edit]

Smith also edited and directed the design of the Anthology. He created the liner notes himself, and these notes are almost as famous as the music, using an unusual fragmented, collage method that presaged some postmodern artwork. Smith also penned short synopses of the songs in the collection, 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 Mouse Frog nuptials, Relatives Approve."

Example from Smith's Liner Notes: #57 – The Coo Coo Bird

Each of the three two-record sets carried the same cover art, a Theodore de Bry etching of an instrument Smith referred to as the "Celestial Monochord," taken from a mystical treatise by scientist/alchemist Robert Fludd. This etching was printed over against a different color background for each volume of the set: blue, red and green. Smith had incorporated both the music and the art into his own unusual cosmology, and each of these colors was considered by Smith to correspond 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.

In the 1960s, Irwin Silber replaced Smith's covers with a Ben Shahn photograph of a poor Depression-era farmer, over Smith's objections, although others^[who?] have considered this a wise commercial choice in the politically charged atmosphere of the folk movement during that decade.

Compact disc reissue[edit]

In 1997, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, having acquired Folkways Records in 1986, reissued the collection on six compact discs, each disc corresponding to each album of the original set on vinyl, including replicas of Smith's original artwork and liner booklet. An additional booklet included expanded track information for each song by Jeff Place, excerpts from Invisible Republic by Greil Marcus, essays by Jon Pankake, Luis Kemnitzer, Moses Asch, and Neil Rosenberg, and tributes and appreciations by John Fahey, John Cohen, Elvis Costello, Peter Stampfel, Luc Sante, Dave Van Ronk, Eric Von Schmidt, Chuck Pirtle, and Allen Ginsberg. The back cover to this booklet closes with a quote by Smith: "I'm glad to say that my dreams came true. I saw America changed through music." At the 40th Grammy Awards, the reissue won awards for Best Album Notes and Best Historical Album.

Critical reception[edit]

Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic	[5]
Entertainment Weekly	A[6]
Rolling Stone	[7]
Spin	10/10[8]
The Village Voice	A+[9]

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."^[5] 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."^[9] Jon Pareles, writing in The New York Times, said that the songs "still sound marvelous and uncanny."^[10]

Influence[edit]

Cover for 1960s reissue
Folkways FA 2951

The Anthology has had enormous historical influence. Smith's methodology of sequencing tracks, along with his inventive liner notes, called attention to the set. This reintroduction of near-forgotten popular styles of rural American music from the selected years to new listeners had impact on American ethnomusicology, and was both directly and indirectly responsible for the aforementioned folk music revival.

The music on the compilation provided direct inspiration to much of the emergent folk music revival movement. The Anthology made widely available music which previously had been largely the preserve of marginal social economic groups. Many people who first heard this music through the Anthology came from very different cultural and economic backgrounds from its original creators and listeners. Many previously obscure songs became standards at hootenannies and folk clubs due to their inclusion on the Anthology. Some of the musicians represented on the Anthology saw their musical careers revived, and made additional recordings and live appearances.

This document is generally thought to have been enormously influential on the folk & blues revival of the 1950s and 1960s, and brought the works of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Mississippi John Hurt, Dick Justice and many others to the attention of musicians such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. The "Harry Smith Anthology," as some call it, was the bible of folk music during the late 1950s and early 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene. As stated in the liner notes to the 1997 reissue, the late musician Dave van Ronk had earlier commented that "we all knew every word of every song on it, including the ones we hated."^[11] In 2003, the album was ranked number 276 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. It is the earliest-released album on that list and also includes the oldest recordings (dating back to Uncle Dave Macon's recording of "Way Down the Old Plank Road" in April 1926).

Track listing[edit]

Production personnel[edit]

• Moses Asch: Liner Notes, Transfers
• Peter Bartok: Transfers
• Joe Bussard: Transfers
• Philip Coady: Producer
• Pat Conte: Transfers
• Evelyn Esaki: Art Direction
• John Fahey: Liner Notes
• David Glasser: Mastering, Audio Restoration
• Amy Horowitz: Executive Producer, Reissue Producer
• Luis Kemnitzer: Liner Notes
• Kip Lornell: Liner Notes
• Michael Maloney: Producer, Production Coordination
• Greil Marcus: Liner Notes
• Mary Monseur: Producer, Production Coordination
• Steve Moreland: Producer
• Jon Pankake: Liner Notes
• Charlie Pilzer: Mastering, Audio Restoration, Transfers
• Chuck Pirtle: Liner Notes
• Jeff Place: Liner Notes, Reissue Producer, Transfers, Annotation
• Pete Reiniger: Mastering, Transfers, Compilation Producer
• Neil V. Rosenberg: Liner Notes
• Luc Sante: Liner Notes
• Peter Seitel: Editing
• Harry Smith: Producer, Editorial
• Stephanie Smith: Research
• Peter Stampfel: Liner Notes
• Alan Stoker: Transfers
• Scott Stowell: Art Direction, Design
• Jack Towers: Transfers
• Eric Von Schmidt: Liner Notes

External links[edit]

• Anthology page on Smithsonian Folkways website

Recordings[edit]

Because of their potential public domain status, some of these recordings are legally available on the Web:

• The Butcher's Boy (The Railroad Boy) by Buell Kazee
• Dry Bones by Bascom Lamar Lunsford
• I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground by Bascom Lamar Lunsford
• White House Blues by Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers
• The Coo Coo Bird by Clarence Ashley
• The House Carpenter by Clarence Ashley
• Country Blues by Dock Boggs
• Drunkard's Special by Coley Jones

Tribute recordings[edit]

• A tribute To The Anthology Of American Folk Music By Harry Smith with covers from Charlie Parr, Orso, and others.
• Harry Smith Project: Anthology Of American Folk Music Revisited a 2-CD/2-DVD box set culled from a series of concerts staged by Hal Willner that took place in 1999 and 2001, pays tribute to Harry Everett Smith and his influential Anthology. Features Beck, Nick Cave, Elvis Costello, Steve Earle, Beth Orton, Lou Reed, Sonic Youth, Richard Thompson, Wilco and others.

Notes[edit]