CD Set Celebrates the Rich Diversity of Our Musical Past

Harry Smith’s “Anthology of American Folk Music” isn’t the kind of album you want to begin listening to late at night, unless you are prepared to greet the dawn.

Once you start sampling the wonderfully diverse folk, country and blues recordings featured in the six-disc Smithsonian Folkways Records set, which was released this week for the first time on CD, you’re likely to lose yourself in an absorbing journey through a rich part of American history.

That’s precisely the effect this album, first released nearly half a century ago in limited edition by Folkways Records, had on an emerging generation of folk-oriented singer-songwriters in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

“The ‘Anthology’ was our bible,” Dave Von Ronk, a member of the celebrated Greenwich Village folk crowd, once said.

Bob Dylan, the most important graduate of that revolutionary scene, also fell under the album’s spell. It’s a connection that critic-historian Greil Marcus details in “Invisible Republic,” his acclaimed new book about the social and musical currents that helped shape Dylan’s historic “Basement Tapes” sessions with the Band in 1967.

In fact, Smith emerges as a virtual co-star of the book, in which Marcus writes at length about the unusual history of the “Anthology” album.

Smith is a major cultural hero not because of any songs he wrote or music he personally played. He’s important because he had the vision to know that something essential was slipping away from the American musical experience.

On one level, you could call Smith simply a superb record collector who enjoyed digging through stacks of dusty 78s in garages and back rooms in the Bay Area, where he lived in the late ‘40s.

But he went about his search with the purpose and vision of a true artist.

In “Invisible Republic,” Marcus insists that it was no accident that “Anthology” was “issued in 1952 at the height of the McCarthyist witch hunt.”

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No doubt unsettled by the increasing homogenization of American life amid the reactionary social climate of the era, Smith saw in the hillbilly, blues, gospel and Cajun music of the late ‘20s and early ‘30s a rawness, daring and diversity that he felt were missing from America in the ‘50s. Thus, the album, in a very real way, was his wake-up call.

In many ways, the music that Smith loved and the conditions that he rebelled against reflected the same passions that ultimately fueled the rock ‘n’ roll revolution.

Smith didn’t set out, as did musicologists before him, to record singers and musicians himself. He didn’t see “field recordings” as his calling. He was drawn to the actual commercial recordings made between 1927, when electronic recordings made accurate music reproduction possible, and 1932, when the Depression virtually halted folk music sales.

“During this five-year period, American music still retained some of the regional qualities evident in the days before the phonograph, radio and talking pictures had tended to integrate local types,” Smith wrote in the booklet for the original album.

Smith, who died in 1991 at the age of 68, prized the differences in America. In choosing and sequencing the 84 recordings featured in “Anthology,” he crossed racial and ethnic lines with the boldness of a Supreme Court decision.

Some of the artists on these records are familiar today: country music’s legendary Carter Family and Stoneman Family as well as such bluesmen as Charley Patton, Mississippi John Hurt and Furry Lewis. Some of the songs, too, are alternative versions of the tunes that are part of the shared American folk experience, including “John Henry” and “Frankie and Johnny.”

Most of the performers and songs, however, are largely unknown to today’s pop and folk audience.

Smith organized the songs in a way that makes the music flow by like scenes through a train window on a trip across the country. To make the journey easier, he even included in the album a personal primer on the history of the recordings.

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Far from being an academic study, the guide was brightened with humorous headline-style descriptions of each song. The one accompanying “Gonna Die With My Hammer in My Hand” (better known as “John Henry”): “John Henry Vows to Defeat Mechanization; Questions Captain, Warns Shaker and Son. Wife Strong, Too.”

In similar fashion, Smith adds this headline description to “Stackalee” (known today as “Stagger Lee”): “Theft of Stetson Hat Causes Deadly Dispute, Victim Identifies Himself as Family Man.”

With its tales of salvation and sin, murder and heroism, hopes and doubts, this collection is an American treasury, a celebration of diversity and roots that is as timely today as when it was first issued.

The hold of “Anthology” on listeners the first time around was so strong that it wasn’t surprising to see Bob Dylan turn to material from it for part of “World Gone Wrong,” his 1993 collection of folk tunes. The hold on today’s audience should be no less unshakable.