Plain Folk
Harry Smith (1923-1991) was
a self-created character, deserving of a novel no one has yet written. Small,
gnomelike, with an acerbic, high-pitched voice, he was a tramp scholar who, in
a peripatetic life on the fringes, became a recognized authority on Seminole
fabrics, Ukrainian Easter eggs, and the ubiquity of string figures in the
world's cultures. He was a record producer, an adept of black magic, and an
avant-garde filmmaker who pioneered, among other things, the kind of collage
animation later made famous by Monty Python's Terry Gilliam. He began
collecting 78-rpm recordings in the early 1940s, acquiring thousands of "race"
and "hillbilly" works from the junk shops of the Pacific Northwest before they
could be melted down, their shellac recuperated for the war effort.
In 1952 he assembled 84 of
these songs in an anthology that was at once systematic and intuitive. In three
volumes-- Ballads , Social Music , and Songs --he gathered
blues, gospel hymns, murder narratives, reels and jigs, Cajun tunes, sermons,
and ancient Child ballads transmuted from their British origins by centuries in
the mountains and valleys of America. He laid down a few ground rules: The
material had to have been recorded commercially, "between 1927, when electronic
recording made possible accurate music reproduction, and 1932 when the
Depression halted folk music sales"; otherwise, he was guided only by
serendipity and his own ears. Yet he succeeded in making a collection that was
definitive in its selections and mysteriously cohesive, the diverse offerings
falling together like strands of a single design. You have to remember that, at
the time, no one had an overview on this stuff. Few people knew any of it,
besides some old-timers and a scattering of enthusiasts; "folk music" meant
either the topical work of Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly or the kind of art-song
taxidermy practiced by the likes of the baritone John Jacob Niles.
Slowly
and invisibly, the Anthology captivated and influenced a generation. It
was the ur-text for the folk music boom of the early 1960s. It was plundered by
everybody, especially Bob Dylan, who swiped, alluded, and rewrote, so much in
the spirit of the original works, among which lines and verses migrate freely,
that he forcefully inserted himself into the tradition. After that, though, the
collection's fame returned underground. Few people born after 1950 had heard of
it, despite its remaining in print until Folkways Records dissolved when its
owner, Moe Asch, died in the mid-1980s.
It has finally been reissued, in a lavish package (full
disclosure: I contributed a small reminiscence of Smith to the liner notes).
This took some doing, because the Anthology was in effect a bootleg--the
original recordings had been imperfectly documented if at all, the artists were
paid small flat fees and sent in most cases back to obscurity, but the
copyrights had accrued to large publishing consortiums. The packaging, while
splendid (and including helpful and sometimes inspiring essays, complete
documentation, and an enhanced CD containing films and recordings of and by
Smith), is maybe too lavish by half, since its price tag will put it far beyond
the means of young people. It is to be hoped that its volumes will be issued
individually.
Nevertheless, it is available again, and its importance cannot be overstated.
Reviewing it in the New York Times , Tom Piazza was reminded of Edmund
Wilson's The Shock of Recognition ; Bruce Shapiro in The Nation
compared it to the reprinting of Moby Dick in the 1920s. Such assertions
might make you suspicious, but they are not hyperbole. Consider that Smith, who
said he searched for records that sounded "odd" or "exotic," managed to include
an array of composers and performers who, rather than being typical or
representative--the goal of most makers of field recordings--were singular
artists. Some were truly weird, others major innovators whose stature would
only be recognized later: Blues radical Charley Patton was forgotten; Dock
Boggs and Frank Hutchinson have barely been given their due even now. (Click to
hear Boggs' menacing combination of blues and high-lonesome mountain styling.)
Consider also that Smith deliberately avoided identifying the performers by
race--"It took years before anybody discovered that Mississippi John Hurt
wasn't a hillbilly," he said, and it is just as surprising to find out that
such bluesmen as Hutchinson and Richard "Rabbit" Brown were white.
The Anthology is a picture of what
indigenous American music was like before the age of mass media, at a time when
songs and ideas could only be transmitted by live performance and by rumor and
yet circulated far and fast, among musicians isolated by race or poverty or
lost in rural backwaters. The migratory quality of lyrics--the fact that lines
and whole verses traveled from this song to that one, from blues to mountain
ballad or vice versa, regardless of origin or even sense--made for a sort of
native Surrealism, a collage by accretion. It also shows how profoundly linked
black and white cultures were; African and Anglo traditions twined around and
through each other like closely planted trees. Tradition, for that matter,
coexisted with experimentation, so that it is not always immediately obvious
which is which--you might not realize from listening that Blind Lemon Jefferson
was an innovator who transformed the blues and influenced every subsequent
artist in the genre, or that the shape-note singing of the Sacred Harp choirs
represents a late vestige of a style that may have reached its acme of
prevalence around the time of the American Revolution. All of it, in any case,
sounds new and fresh and enduringly strange.
There is history here, of
all sorts: Kelly Harrell impersonating Charles Guiteau, President Garfield's
assassin; the Carolina Tar Heels voicing the lament of shoemakers made
redundant by the Industrial Revolution; Charlie Poole singing, "Roosevelt in
the White House, he's doing his best; McKinley in the graveyard, he's taking
his rest." Other songs date back to the 16 th century, or the
17 th or the 18 th . Then Patton, appearing here under his
record-company-imposed pseudonym, "the Masked Marvel," cuts loose with
"Mississippi Boweavil Blues," a number as new and startling and disruptive
today as it was the day he wrote it; dispensing with verse-chorus, he barks and
then punctuates with two klaxon notes--rock 'n' roll!
There are compelling
grotesqueries--"The Fatal Flower Garden," by Nelstone's Hawaiians--and items of
ineffable grandeur, such as the hymn "," by the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers.
Blind Willie Johnson and his wife sing about the Book of the Seven
Seals , but not so great a distance separates them from Rabbit Brown, who
sings, "Sometimes I think that you're too sweet to die, but other times I think
you ought to be buried alive." Clarence Ashley will build his cabin up on the
mountain so he can see "Willie" fly by, and warns that the railroad men will
drink up your blood like wine, and Jim Jackson lowers the cadaver of his old
dog on a silver chain as with every link he calls his name. Murder, deception,
defiance, laughter, orgy, rapture, and arcadia are all represented; there isn't
a number that doesn't exude passion. The Anthology of American Folk
Music , as pure and exalted and lowdown and variegated an article of the
native culture as you'll find anywhere, is no museum piece; as well as being
ancient, it is sensational, vivid, and wild.
