Anthology Of American Folk Music
More info:Download :: https://goo.gl/kHPrFB
Harry Smith's (1952) Anthology of American Folk Music
More info Download :: https://goo.gl/kHPrFB
Basic info & track list:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthology_of_American_Folk_Music
Big influence on modern rock
music.
Occasionally a single artifact, document or exhibition
manages both to
recast the way in which artists see their tradition and
to reanimate their
sense of what is possible within that tradition. Such
cultural moments act
as prisms, gathering together work from different ends of
a genre's
spectrum and allowing them to blend in a new way.
In 1997, Smithsonian Folkways records re-released another
such document,
the "Anthology of American Folk Music,"
originally issued by Folkways
Records in 1952. The brainchild of the avant-garde
filmmaker, folklorist
and anthropologist Harry Smith, the anthology comprised
three boxed two-LP
sets that contained 84 performances recorded between 1926
and 1933.
Included were early black blues and white country music,
Cajun recordings,
hymns and sacred music, and more, thrown together under a
loose framework
that almost single-handedly redefined folk music.
In doing so, the anthology became the single most
important source of
material and inspiration for many young singers in the
1950's and 60's and
the touchstone of the early-60's "folk
revival." Such performers as Bob
Dylan, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs and the New Lost City Ramblers,
as well as
later offshoots like the Byrds, Bruce Springsteen and
Jerry Garcia, owe not
just repertory and techniques but, in a real sense, a
large portion of
their world view to the anthology's conflation of such
seemingly different
traditions.
The package appeared on the small but important Folkways
label, run by
Moses Asch, who had recorded performers like Woody
Guthrie, Leadbelly and
Pete Seeger, and thought of his label as a great aural
museum. Before
issuing Harry Smith's Anthology, Folkways had released a
series of
compilations of various ethnic musics as well as early
jazz music. But
Smith's project was different.
The anthology itself seemed to have a personality, much
like that of its
compiler: erudite, hermetic, witty in a deadpan way. The
cover of each
boxed volume was plain black cardboard, with the
selections and performers
listed plainly on a label affixed to the front. Volume 1
contained ballads
(songs with a narrative content), Volume 2 was titled
Social Music (dance
music and religious music) and Volume 3 was a catchall
called Songs,
offering vocal selections with no real narrative aspect.
(The six-disk reissue wisely follows the exact format and
sequence of the
original.)
Each box contained a copy of a booklet written, designed
and laid out by
Smith himself, an idiosyncratic compendium of
discographical information,
bibliographical references and summaries of the songs,
all set in various
type fonts and illustrated with photographs,
advertisements from old record
catalogues and other ephemera.
The music itself on the anthology opens a door to a world
that will be just
as strange to most listeners of today as it was in 1952,
and perhaps more
so. The lyrics offer a panorama of murders, religious
visions, hangings,
agrarian complaints, heroic exploits, swindles,
assassinations and endless
traveling. The extraordinary range of vocal sounds in
which these marvels
are expressed is no less wondrous. The nasal timbre of
the coal miner and
banjoist Dock Boggs on his two 1927 recordings included
here, or the
rasping throat tones of the religious street singer Blind
Willie Johnson,
so different from each other, both still carry the power
to shock 70 years
after they were recorded.
The vitality and variety of the music are staggering,
from the country
singer Uncle Dave Macon's hollering, headlong vocal and
banjo on "Down the
Old Plank Road" to the inwardness of the New Orleans
songster Rabbit Brown
on his "James Alley Blues" to the pinched, wry,
tall-tale quality of Kelly
Harrell's small 1927 masterpiece "My Name Is John
Johanna," a song about a
laborer's disastrous trip to Arkansas in search of work.
Several pieces,
like Buell Kazee's "East Virginia," have the
odd-sounding modal harmonic
quality of English ballads; elsewhere one finds
Anglo-Irish fiddle tunes,
Cajun dance music from Louisiana and collective ensemble
gospel singing by
black and white groups that rivet you to your spot by
their intensity and
commitment. Many of the performers remain obscure even to
this day. ?? ??
he performances were originally recorded commercially by
companies that were trying to compete with radio in the
1920's by finding
new markets among the people of the rural South. The 78
rpm records were
often designated as "hillbilly" or "old
time" (euphemisms for rural white)
and "race" (euphemism for black). What Harry
Smith did that was new was to
throw these recordings together, with no regard for the
commercial
categories for which they had initially been recorded.
The booklet resolutely avoided mentioning the race or
ethnicity of
performers, and many of the songs that were included
cropped up in both
black and white traditions. The rationale for listening
to a performance on
the anthology's terms was not that it represented the
voice of a specific
ethnic group; rather, strangeness, passion and mystery,
the anthology
seemed to proclaim, are universal human traits.
It was a revolutionary message and is still so today,
when so many claims
of identity are staked along ethnic lines.
Smith's cultural Trojan horse rolled into public view at
the beginning of
the Eisenhower 1950's, in the wake of World War II, as
America was asking
itself in many ways, not all of them healthy, what it
meant to be American.
Powerful currents of standardization were all around;
anxiety about fitting
in, assimilating, returning to normalcy after the war and
a residual sense
of threat from outside quickened the impulse to locate a
common denominator
in behaviors and values. It was the period in which
Levittown was born.
Into these currents strode the anthology, implicitly
asserting the
multifarious, the odd, the local as being somehow
definitively American.
That apparent paradox appealed to those who wanted to see
behind the
conformist scrim of the Eisenhower era. To them, the
anthology was a sort
of palimpsest wherein they read a secret cultural history
of the nation.
Among these were the young men and women who made up the
folk revival. Many
of them, like the members of the New Lost City Ramblers,
a traditionalist
group, strove to recreate the original performances in as
faithful a manner
as possible; others used the anthology as a trove of
material to mine, and
transmute. Bob Dylan is certainly the best example of
this; his earliest
performances were full of material taken from the
anthology. Echoes of
lyrics from anthology songs continued to appear in Mr.
Dylan's later works.
On his most recent disk, "World Gone Wrong"
(1993), he performs several
tunes that appear on the anthology.
If the anthology energized a new generation of performers
it did the same
for a new generation of folklorists, mostly white and
mostly male -- among
them Mike Seeger, Ralph Rinzler and Paul Clayton -- who
traveled south in
hopes of finding the original performers. An amazing
number of them turned
out to still be alive; the Newport Folk Festivals of the
early 1960's
offered a procession of them -- Clarence Ashley, Dock
Boggs, Mississippi
John Hurt, Furry Lewis, Buell Kazee and others -- in one
of the great
reclamation projects in American cultural history.
The re-issue of the anthology is the most significant
event yet in
Smithsonian Folkways' superb reactivation of the original
Folkways
catalogue, which the Smithsonian Institution acquired in
1987, after Mr.
Asch's death. Smithsonian Folkways has taken care to
allude repeatedly to
the original anthology in its repackaging.
Included is a reproduction of the original booklet as
well as invaluable
supplemental notes, an expanded bibliography and references
to other
recordings of the same material by other artists.
There are essays on the anthology's effect at the time,
including a
wonderfully pointed one by the folklorist Jon Pankake, as
well as
reminiscences of Harry Smith, who died in 1991, by those
who knew him.
The re-issue also features a long essay by the writer
Greil Marcus
excerpted from his recent book "Invisible
Republic," which offers insights
into the anthology's place in American culture. Not
included in the
package, but worth reading, is a chapter in Robert
Cantwell's recent book
on the folk revival entitled "When We Were
Good," which puts Smith's
achievement in lucid historical and cultural context. The
current set's
sixth disk is an enhanced CD offering photographs,
biographical material
about Smith, video footage and linkage to an Anthology
Web site.
Somehow, in the process of gathering all its voices
together, the anthology
became not just a loose confederation but an integral
unit, a whole made up
of the most disparate parts, like some ideal America of
its own. It was a
gauntlet thrown down, in a sense, a challenge to ponder:
what kind of unity
could possibly underlie this diversity? It is a question
we still ask, and
the re-issue of this milestone set helps us ask it in
appreciative wonder.
“It’s a game changer”: Why Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music is one of the most important records in US history
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