NRR Project: Anthology of American Folk Music (1951)

 

NRR Project: Anthology of American Folk Music

Collected and curated by Harry Smith

Released 1951

4 hrs., 15 min.

Oh my God. First, just go and listen to the thing. Take the time to do it. You’ll thank me.

It’s most extraordinary compendium of what Greil Marcus referred to as the music of “the old, weird America.” It covers folk music. It includes the blues. There are spirituals. There’s early country music here. The 84 songs were selected from genius scholar and filmmaker Harry Smith’s 78 rpm collection, recordings ranging from 1926 to 1933. The meticulous Smith classified them as three themed albums: ballads, “social music,” and songs.

It was not particularly noted at the time of its release. However, it inspired a whole generation of fans, first, folk singers, then rock bands, and rapidly evolving genres such as bluegrass and country. It created the American folk revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s. It inspired Baez and Dylan. Its impact and value cannot be overstated. Do I make myself clear?

It’s epic. It’s bizarre. It’s a revelation, The songs are ghosts from the primeval past, the American past.

And it was created by a bizarre individual. Harry Smith was an amateur anthropologist, an experimental filmmaker, a committed drug user, and a collector of all sorts of oddities, including 20,000 78 rpm records. It was from this collection that he culled the Anthology. Read about him here in Ian Nasgoski’s excellent essay at the National Recording Registry.

Smith plumbed the depths of American song, and its nooks and crannies, within the parameters he set for himself. He created the Anthology as a magnificent gesamtkunstwerk, a synthesis of sound, picture, and text that came neatly packaged together. Smith’s illustrated commentaries on each selection, released as a booklet along with the collection, are penetrating, pithy, and apt. (A fourth volume of vintage Americana in the Anthology series, encompassing 28 more songs released between 1928 and 1940, was released on Ravenant Records in 2000.)

The result of all this hard work is a document that illuminates the American musical psyche of the past. The largely ignored genres and little-heard tunes that are ironically now immortalized by Smith are, of a body, haunting: this is music made by real people, not mainstream groups nor mainstream genres. Thanks to Smith, those otherwise lost voices come back to haunt us. He gave us an X-ray of America’s soul.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Next time: Dylan Thomas recites his A Child’s Christmas in Wales.