Harry Smith’s “Anthology” - the greatest music compilation of them all?

I’m ambivalent about much old-timey roots music: I start off listening to compilations of field or commercial recordings of blues and folk performers from the 1930s and 1940s with the best intentions – but after two or three tracks my brain starts saying, “Anyone fancy a pint?”

Often it’s because you’d have to be an expert in the field to tell one from the other: the songs just blend into each other after a while to form one long double entendre involving dripping honey and big sausages or a tale of woe featuring dead mules and faithless wives and poker games gone wrong:there’s only so much thinly-recorded bad luck and lust a chap can take.

But the one absolute exception, a compilation I’ve returned to many times over the past thirteen years, is Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, comprising six CDs issued in an expensive Box Set by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings in 1997 (a snip at £71.99). The anthology was originally issued on Folkways as a series of double-albums in 1952. Although it was anything but a bestseller, it pretty much created the 1950s Folk Revival in the States, which in turn led to Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, the Byrds, Gram Parsons, Crosby, Stills & Nash and thousands of other folk and folk-rock acts, every one of whom would probably have known the collection backwards –Dylan himself certainly nicked enough of the tunes to fill a whole LP.

It could be argued that no single collection of old recordings has ever had a greater effect on the direction of popular music. As folkie Dave Van Ronk said in 1991, “We all knew every word of every song on it, including the ones we hated.” As John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers put it in 1995, “It gave us contact with musicians and cultures we wouldn’t have known existed.”

I suppose the nearest my generation came to the experience was Paul Oliver’s The Story of the Blues double-LP compilations from the early 1970s – but, by then, old blues recordings had pretty well been plundered to death by countless British R&B groups in the 1960s. It was enjoyable, but it didn’t come as a revelation.

So, why does Harry Smith’s anthology work for a fairly interested but non-obsessive modern listener? 

Well, for a start, all of the tracks had been released by commercial record labels, so some quality filter had already been applied, and we presume that, between 1927, when advances in recording techniques led to a higher sound quality, and 1932, when the Depression knocked the stuffing out of the US record industry, a fair number of people went out and bought these records. Secondly, the 84 tracks selected by Smith were from a potential list of thousands: this was the absolute cream of a huge crop. Third, Harry Smith had great taste.

But the fourth– and probably most important - reason was that Smith turned sequencing into an art form. There’s something about the order of the tracks that makes it all work as one organic whole – play them out of sequence on iTunes, and one’s concentration rapidly wanders: play them in sequence, as Smith intended, and it’s like listening to any favourite LP, where the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts, and where the fact that a track is Track 4 on Side 2 actually matters.

Thanks to Smith’s exquisite sense of placement, we end up hearing the music that he loved as he wanted us to hear it, in one long, mysteriously coherent narrative. The effect is enhanced by the original booklet which accompanied the original release (reproduced for the 1997 CD version) – Smith told the story of each song in the form of newspaper headlines: for instance, the Carter Family’s excellent “John Hardy was a Desperate Little Man” is headlined “JOHN HARDY HELD WITHOUT BAIL AFTER GUNPLAY. GIRLS IN RED AND BLUE VISIT CHURCH. WIFE AT SCAFFOLD.”

The quirkiness of the whole enterprise is its making. Smith was certainly a true original: musicologist, maker of experimental films (unwatchable, one presumes), and mystic. He was, inevitably, constantly short of money, rarely of any fixed abode, and a keen imbiber of drugs and alcohol (these three facts may possibly have been connected). He died in 1991 at the Chelsea Hotel in New York (where else?). What he left us was a window onto what Bob Dylan called “The Old Weird America”, a world more recent but somehow far stranger to us than, say, that of Dickens, Shakespeare or even Chaucer. Perhaps that’s because we can hear the voices of the performers rather than supplying them from our own imagination, as we do when reading, or having modern actors do it for us on stage or screen.

As it is, we’re afforded a glimpse of an intriguingly uninterpreted world. In

Bascombe Lamar Lunsford’s “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground”, for instance, the singer meets Kimpy, a lady who wants a $9 shawl. Luckily, he has $40 on him. She asks the singer, who has already told us he wishes he was a mole in the ground so he could “root that mountain down”, where he’s “been so long”. He tells her he’s been “down in the bend [possibly prison], with those rough and rowdy men”, and adds:

                    “I don’t like a railroad man

                    No, I don’t like a railroad man

                    If I was a railroad man, they would kill you when he can

                    Drink up your blood like wine”

Huh?

The surrealistic, dream-like strangeness is compounded by that fact that Lunsford’s halting banjo-playing doesn’t altogether match the rhythm of his singing. Lunsford, known as the “Minstrel of the Appalachians” was a North Carolina lawyer who described the song as “ a typical product of the Pigeon River Valley” – if so, it might be a region best driven through at speed, with the car windows up and central-locking on. 

The impression of having entered a parallel universe when listening to the Anthology is heightened by the strange spelling of some artists’ names and song titles: did Furry Lewis think that we wouldn’t recognise “Kassie Jones”as “Casey Jones”, and did Bill Casey imagine we’d be put off the scent by calling himself “Buell Kazee”? (Of course, they might just not have been very good at spelling - not a public school man among them, I suspect.)

If Lunsford sounds oddly friendly, Doc Boggs, here performing “Sugar Baby”, sounds like a 120-year old homicidal maniac. Did people honestly used to dance cheerily to this sort of music? It’s so threatening, and it sounds like it predates the landing of the Mayflower.

I mentioned Blind Willie Johnson’s compelling “John the Revelator” in an earlier post – in this context, it sounds positively normal.

Oddly, the primitive nature of the recording techniques puts you right there with the singers: listen to Rev. Sister Mary Nelson’s “Judgment”, and you’re in the midst of the gospelling ladies, with their superb, joyful voices: and can’t you just see those Cajun dancers bopping along to Hoyt  “Floyd” Ming and his Pep-Steppers (oh those glorious names!) performing “Indian War Whoop”. I guarantee no modern digital recording ever created such a sense of presence.

       

There are countless other delights, of course, and some well-known names – Blind Lemon Jefferson and the beautiful, feathery tones of “Mississippi” John Hurt – but even they never sounded as right as they do in the context of this wondrous compilation.