Anthology of American Folk Music is a three-album compilation, 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 experimental film maker Harry Smith's own personal collection of 78 rpm records.
Harry Smith was a West Coast filmmaker, magickian, bohemian, and eccentric.[5] As a teenager he started collecting old blues, jazz, country, Cajun, and gospel records and accumulated a large collection of recordings,[6] 78s 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] Folkways founder Moses had a "reputation for releasing copyrighted songs without going through the proper legal channels."[10]
The compilation was divided by Smith into three two-album volumes: "Ballads," "Social Music," and "Songs." As the title indicates, the first "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 that was likely performed at social gatherings or dances, with many of the songs being instrumentals. The second album in the "Social Music" volume consists of religious and spiritual songs, including some Gospel 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."[11]
Smith's booklet in the original release makes reference to three additional planned volumes in the series, which would anthologize 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 is themed around songs about work and mainly featured 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
The design of the anthology was edited and directed by Smith himself. He created the liner notes himself, and these notes are almost as well known 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 in Mouse Frog Nuptials, Relatives Approve."[13]
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,"[14] taken from a mystical treatise by scientist/alchemistRobert 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.
Release and reissues
Cover for 1960s reissue Folkways FA 2951, featuring a poor Depression-era farmer
The Anthology was originally released as three double-LP box sets on August 9, 1952.[15] It sold relatively poorly when it was first released – 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 have considered this a wise commercial choice in the politically charged atmosphere of the folk movement during that decade.[16]
In 2006, Shout! Factory and the Harry Smith Archive released a tribute album titled The Harry Smith Project: The 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.[18] The album features artists such as Beck, Nick Cave, Elvis Costello, Steve Earle, Beth Orton, Lou Reed, Sonic Youth, Richard Thompson, Wilco and others, covering the songs of the original anthology.
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."[26]Jon Pareles, writing in The New York Times, said that the songs "still sound marvelous and uncanny."[27]
Though relatively little was written about the Anthology during the first years after release (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")[32] musicians and writers relate how much of an impact it had on them at the time.[33] The music on the compilation provided direct inspiration to much of the emergent folk music revival movement. The anthology made 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 release is generally thought to have been massively 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, musician Dave van Ronk had earlier commented that "we all knew every word of every song on it, including the ones we hated."[34]
The Anthology has had major historical influence. Smith's method of sequencing tracks, along with his inventive liner notes, called attention to the set.[35] 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 American folk music revival.[36]
Sing Out! published a full article on the whole release in 1969.[32]
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."[37]
The New Lost City Ramblers, or NLCR, was an American contemporary old-time string band that formed in New York City in 1958 during the folk revival. Mike Seeger, John Cohen and Tom Paley were its founding members. Tracy Schwarz replaced Paley, who left the group in 1962. Seeger died of cancer in 2009, Paley died in 2017, and Cohen died in 2019. NLCR participated in the old-time music revival, and directly influenced many later musicians.
Ella Jenkins is an American folk singer and actress. Dubbed "The First Lady of the Children's Folk Song" by the Wisconsin State Journal, she has been a leading performer of children's music for over 50 years. Her album, Multicultural Children's Songs (1995), has long been the most popular Smithsonian Folkways release. She has appeared on numerous children's television programs and in 2004, she received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
Harry Everett Smith was an American polymath, who was credited variously as an artist, experimental filmmaker, bohemian, mystic, record collector, hoarder, student of anthropology and a Neo-Gnostic bishop.
"The Titanic" (also known as "It Was Sad When That Great Ship Went Down" and "Titanic (Husbands and Wives)") is a folk song and children's song. "The Titanic" is about the sinking of RMS Titanic which sank on April 15, 1912, after striking an iceberg.
Dust Bowl Ballads is an album by American folk singer Woody Guthrie. It was released by Victor Records, in 1940. All the songs on the album deal with the Dust Bowl and its effects on the country and its people. It is considered to be one of the first concept albums. It was Guthrie's first commercial recording and the most successful album of his career.
Smithsonian Folkways is the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian Institution. It is a part of the Smithsonian's Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, located at Capital Gallery in downtown Washington, D.C. The label was founded in 1987 after the family of Moses Asch, founder of Folkways Records, donated the entire Folkways Records label to the Smithsonian. The donation was made on the condition that the Institution continue Asch's policy that each of the more than 2,000 albums of Folkways Records remain in print forever, regardless of sales. Since then, the label has expanded on Asch's vision of documenting the sounds of the world, adding six other record labels to the collection, as well as releasing over 300 new recordings. Some well-known artists have contributed to the Smithsonian Folkways collection, including Pete Seeger, Ella Jenkins, Woody Guthrie, and Lead Belly. Famous songs include "This Land Is Your Land", "Goodnight, Irene", and "Midnight Special". Due to the unique nature of its recordings, which include an extensive collection of traditional American music, children's music, and international music, Smithsonian Folkways has become an important collection to the musical community, especially to ethnomusicologists, who utilize the recordings of "people's music" from all over the world.
Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes (1997) is a book by music critic Greil Marcus about the creation and cultural importance of The Basement Tapes, a series of recordings made by Bob Dylan in 1967 in collaboration with the Hawks, who would subsequently become known as the Band. (ISBN 0-8050-5842-7)
American singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie's published recordings are culled from a series of recording sessions in the 1940s and 1950s. At the time they were recorded they were not set down for a particular album, so are found over several albums not necessarily in chronological order. The more detailed section on recording sessions lists the song by recording date.
"I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground" is a traditional American folk song. It was most famously recorded by Bascom Lamar Lunsford in 1928 for Brunswick Records in Ashland, Kentucky. Harry Smith included "I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground" on his Anthology of American Folk Music released by Folkways Records in 1952. The notes for Smith's Anthology state that Lunsford learned this song from Fred Moody, a North Carolina neighbor, in 1901.
Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, Volume 4 is a two-disc compilation of twenty-eight American folk recordings originally released on 78 rpm records between 1927 and 1940, issued in May 2000 on Revenant Records, catalogue #211. Compiled by experimental filmmaker and notable eccentric Harry Smith as the fourth album of his Anthology of American Folk Music set from 1952, it was never completed by Smith himself. While the CD is out of print, an LP version has been issued, along with the other three volumes, on the Portland-based Mississippi Records label.
Folkways Records was a record label founded by Moses Asch that documented folk, world, and children's music. It was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution in 1987 and is now part of Smithsonian Folkways.
Moses Asch was an American recording engineer and record executive. He founded Asch Records, which then changed its name to Folkways Records when the label transitioned from 78 RPM recordings to LP records. Asch ran the Folkways label from 1948 until his death in 1986. Folkways was very influential in bringing folk music into the American cultural mainstream. Some of America's greatest folk songs were originally recorded for Asch, including "This Land Is Your Land" by Woody Guthrie and "Goodnight Irene" by Lead Belly. Asch sold many commercial recordings to Verve Records; after his death, Asch's archive of ethnic recordings was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution, and released as Smithsonian Folkways Records.
The Country Blues is a seminal album released on Folkways Records in 1959, catalogue RF 1. Compiled by Samuel Charters from 78-rpm recordings, it accompanied his book of the same name to provide examples of the music discussed. Both the book and the album were key documents in the American folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s, and many of its songs would either be incorporated into new compositions by later musicians, or covered outright.
Stinson Records was an American record label formed by Herbert Harris and Irving Prosky in 1939, initially to market, in the US, recordings made in the Soviet Union. Between the 1940s and 1960s, it mainly issued recordings of American folk and blues musicians, including Woody Guthrie and Josh White.
Trouble in Mind is an album by American blues musician Big Bill Broonzy. It was released on February 22, 2000 by Smithsonian Folkways. The album consists of traditional folk, blues, and spiritual songs featuring Broonzy accompanying himself on acoustic guitar and a guest appearance by Pete Seeger. Suffering from cancer, Broonzy realized his time was limited and hence recorded extensively between 1956 and 1957. While most of the work draws from the album Big Bill Broonzy Sings Country Blues (1957), arranged by Moses Asch and Charles Edward Smith, Trouble in Mind is also sourced from concert broadcasts and interviews recorded late in Broonzy's career.
American Epic: The Collection is a 100-track, 5-CD box set of American roots music performances from the 1920s and 1930s. It was compiled by film director Bernard MacMahon to accompany the release of his American Epic documentary film series. The box features 100 songs by 100 different artists and has been acclaimed by many critics as a worthy successor to the Anthology of American Folk Music and one of the best box sets to ever be released. The box set won particular acclaim for the song selection and the sound quality of the transfers of vintage 78rpm records.
Jeff Place is the Grammy Award-winning writer and producer and a curator and senior archivist with the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. He has won three Grammy Awards and six Indie Awards.
Lead Belly Sings for Children is a compilation album by American folk and blues singer Lead Belly. It was released in 1999 by Smithsonian Folkways.
Leadbelly Sings Folk Songs is a remastered compilation album of American folk songs sung by legend Leadbelly accompanied by Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, and Sonny Terry, originally recorded by Moses Asch in the 1940s and re-released in 1989 by Folkways Records.
Negro Folk Songs is an album by Lead Belly, recorded in 1943 and released as an album in early 1946.
↑ 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
1 2 Smith, 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...
1 2 Katherine Skinner (Jan 2006). "'Must Be Born Again': Resurrecting the 'Anthology of American Folk Music'". Popular Music. Cambridge University Press. 25 (1): 61. JSTOR3877543.
↑ Katherine Skinner (Jan 2006). "'Must Be Born Again': Resurrecting the 'Anthology of American Folk Music'". Popular Music. Cambridge University Press. 25 (1): 60. JSTOR3877543.
↑ Marcus, Greil. "The Old, Weird America," liner note essay. Anthology of American Folk Music, 1997 reissue, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.
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