[Today: Harry Smith saves the past from extinction...]
The open plains of the American Dream once stretched in all directions, and the promise of that possibility included all of the darkest impulses of the human psyche. America was built by prospectors, politicians, lawyers, and the like, but it was made great by gamblers, gunslingers, gold diggers, con men, and carneys. Harry Smith innately understood that dichotomy, and perhaps better than anyone else, captured its spirit in song.
His Anthology Of American Folk Music – released in 1952 by Folkways Records – collects 84 songs recorded by various artists between 1927 and 1935. Smith meticulously selected, collated, and sequenced these songs for maximum effect. And that effect is to slyly show that even though a dusty past seems disconnected from our modern existence, the truth of the matter is that we have much in common with the people in these songs. Their concerns – love, death, money, jealousy, crime, natural disaster, god’s wrath – are at heart the things people will always worry about.
The Anthology Of American Folk Music appears to be a series of strange, sepia-toned pictures that are hilarious and tragic, but after you spend some time with them, you’ll realize those aren’t pictures you’re gazing into, but mirrors.
24 September 2009 at 11:14 am |
[...] Boggs had been immortalized on Harry Smith’s musically anthropological compilation, the Anthology Of American Folk Music. In June of 1963 Mike Seeger (brother of Pete) tracked Boggs down at his home in Norton, VA and [...]
12 December 2010 at 12:30 pm |
[...] narratives. In John Fahey’s liner notes to the CD re-release of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, he opines that “‘Frankie’ is… probably the best guitar recording ever. [...]