Harry Smith
- In full:
- Harry Everett Smith
Harry Smith (born May 29, 1923, Portland, Oregon, U.S.—died November 27, 1991, New York, New York) was an American filmmaker, painter, musicologist, ethnographer, collector, and mystic. Smith is best known as the compiler of the Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), which served as a catalyst and influential source for the folk revival of the 1960s. Appreciation also has grown for his contributions as an experimental filmmaker and painter. An autodidact and polymath whose eccentric but innovative artistic pursuits and collecting are legendary, he was one of the most colourful multidisciplinary artists of the 20th century.
Early life
The facts of Smith’s biography are clouded by mythmaking, much of which was his own creation. He grew up in the Pacific Northwest, principally in Bellingham and Anacortes, Washington. His father worked in the salmon industry; his mother was a teacher on the Lummi Indian Reservation. Both parents were theosophists, and Smith was reared in a household with a large library of books on the occult. His mother is said to have sometimes claimed that she was Russian grand duchess Anastasia. Smith’s father introduced him to Kabbala and presented him, at age 12, with blacksmithing tools, which, according to Smith, he was told to use to transform lead into gold, the ancient objective of alchemy. The alchemist’s goal of mixing elements (including deranging the senses) to produce mystical or transcendent outcomes would be central to Smith’s art and worldview. Involved with mysticism and magic throughout his life, Smith, on occasion, groundlessly claimed that his biological father was actually British occultist Aleister Crowley.
As a youth, Smith became fascinated with ritual and the role that music and language played in it. As early as junior high school, he began making extended visits to reservations of the Lummi and Salish people, tape-recording their ceremonies and developing a method to transcribe the dances he witnessed. In the process, he became interested in the interconnectedness of sound, images, and movement. Indeed, synesthesia (the blending of the senses, in which the stimulation of one sense causes the automatic experience of another sense—for example, hearing colours) would become a guiding principle in his painting and filmmaking.
At an early age, Smith began a lifelong fascination with patterns that recurred in various cultures, and he looked for commonalities among them that would reveal universal truths. Although he would act as a cultural anthropologist throughout his life, his formal training in the discipline was limited to five semesters of study at the University of Washington, from 1942 to 1944. About this time Smith was employed by Seattle-based aircraft manufacturer Boeing. Because of his small stature, he was able to perform wiring tasks in parts of the World War II-era bombers built by Boeing that were inaccessible to other workers. Much of the income he derived from that work would later go to the purchase of 78-rpm records, and he amassed a huge collection focused on American traditional music—having been smitten by a single he heard by Mississippi bluesman Tommy McClennan. Smith’s collecting (and preservation) of these records would prove to be auspicious: made of shellac, a key ingredient in the production of ammunition, records became a scarce commodity after the widespread melting down of them to abet the war effort.
In the mid-1940s Smith relocated to Berkeley, California. He was attracted by the Bay Area’s rich bohemian cultural environment, which offered a cosmic mix of alternative religions, sexual openness, drug taking, and jazz. The house in Berkeley in which he had an apartment was also home to renowned ethnomusicologist Bertrand Bronson, the foremost expert on Francis J. Child, compiler of the definitive collection of traditional American ballads. Smith’s interaction with Bronson would influence Smith’s approach to the study of folk music.
Filmmaking and painting
Smith had begun making painstakingly intricate experimental films, first painting or using batik methods directly on the film, later using an optical printer. In them, geometric shapes moved and shifted form rhythmically. Smith’s early filmmaking, much influenced by Oskar Fischinger (who contributed to the Disney animated classic film Fantasia [1940]), was an extension of his painting, which in turn was influenced by Russian-born abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky. In Berkeley, Smith befriended like-minded nonobjective filmmaker and painter Jordan Belson. The two became immersed in the world of West Coast experimental cinema that was showcased in the Art in Cinema series at the San Francisco Museum of Art (later San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), where Smith’s early films were screened with live jazz accompaniment.
Enamoured of bebop jazz, Smith moved in 1946 to the hub of San Francisco’s jazz scene, the predominantly Black Fillmore District. At the late-night jazz club Jimbo’s Bop City, he showed his films to the improvised accompaniment of legendary musicians such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk. His efforts to visualize sound also included paintings in which individual brushstrokes corresponded one-to-one with notes in jazz compositions, most notably Manteca (c. 1950), an interpretation of a Gillespie composition. Smith’s pursuit of abstract art earned him the patronage of Hilla Rebay, curator of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later the Guggenheim Museum), which contributed to his decision to move to New York City in 1951. There Smith became part of a scene of experimental filmmakers that included Jonas Mekas. His subsequent films became collagelike and incorporated realistic elements and recognizable symbols while retaining a surrealistic quality. His 12th film, Heaven and Earth Magic (c. 1957–62), is the high point of this period. Shot from 1970 to 1972 and edited for some eight years, Smith’s final film, Mahagonny (1980), employs a numerological and symbolic system to interpret Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Complexly structured and filtered through a number of film genres, it incorporates animation, images of New York City landmarks, and portraits of avant-garde artists to explore human existence. It is widely considered to be Smith’s cinematic masterpiece.
Anthology of American Folk Music
Not long after his move to New York City, Smith found himself short of money, as he had throughout most of his life. (His frequent insolvency contributed to the disappearance of many of his works of art and collections, which were sometimes left behind in apartments or rented rooms from which he was evicted.) In 1952 he approached Moses Asch, owner of Folkways Records, and offered to sell him a portion of his huge record collection for rerelease. Instead of purchasing the records, Asch, recognizing Smith’s erudite knowledge of the traditional American music represented in his collection, suggested that Smith cull from it and compile an anthology to be released on Folkways. Smith took on the challenge, approaching it with both academic discipline and unfettered creativity.
Repackaging and releasing the recordings in question were of dubious legality. Those that Smith ended up using originally had been released between 1926 and 1934 by major record labels. Realizing that there was a regional market in the South for the blues-related “race” music created by Black Americans and the “hillbilly” (traditional folk) music made by southern whites, those record companies set up recording sessions, mainly in the South, to exploit it. Unlike the preservationist field recordings of folklorists John and Alan Lomax, the motive for these efforts was profit.
In the 30-odd years since the release of the records used by Smith, the music industry had undergone great changes. After being hobbled by the Great Depression and the wartime shortage of shellac, it had rebounded but reflected a new, increasingly media-driven cultural landscape. In the staid consensus-molded world of McCarthyism, the music chosen by Smith reflected a rawer, more emotive, and idiosyncratic culture, which historian Greil Marcus would characterize as the “old, weird America.”
Smith’s collection—made up of early country, blues, and gospel music along with jazz, Cajun and Celtic music, cowboy songs, dance numbers, and jug band music—comprised 84 songs contained on 6 331/3-rpm long-playing (LP) vinyl records. It also included an exhaustively researched, carefully organized, and imaginatively illustrated booklet with individual entries on each recording that provided production details, references to other recordings of the song in question, bibliographic references, varying background information, and clever newspaper headline-like summaries of the subject matter of the songs. Smith conceived of the anthology as a “theater of the mind.” The genius of his accomplishment was not just in its selection but in its structure and sequencing, in the juxtaposition of recordings that echoed the sound, subject matter, lyrics, or zeitgeist of those preceding and following them. Convinced of the cultural commonalities shared by the performers, Smith refused to segregate or identify them by race, an approach which undeniably had social and political implications, offering a vision of a world shorn of bigotry to a country on the precipice of the civil rights era. The resulting musical collage is undoubtedly Smith’s most accomplished feat of alchemy.
He divided the collection into three categories: ballads (packaged with a green label representing water), social music (with a red label for fire), and songs (blue label for air), each of which was represented on two LPs. The collection’s cover illustration was a 16th-century sketch by Theodor de Bry, depicting the “celestial monochord,” a single-stringed instrument to which the hand of God is reaching. Greil Marcus, who has written exhaustively about the collection, identifies ballads as a standard academic category made up of compositions with a beginning, a middle, and an ending; defines social music as recordings that “presuppose” a community or family; and describes “songs” as a category that was created by Smith to gather songs that borrow lyrics (phrases, couplets, and verses) from other songs in the folk tradition, stitching them together in new ways that allow singers to tell their own stories.
Among the memorable tracks in the collection were:
- “The Coo Coo Bird,” a mountain song with medieval roots, performed by Clarence Ashley, which may have as much to do with infidelity as it does to do with an early sign of spring.
- “Spike Driver Blues,” a revisionist take on the John Henry story by Mississippi John Hurt, a tenant farmer who became a darling of the folk revival.
- “John Hardy Was a Desperate Little Man,” an early recording by the Carter Family, the “First Family of Country Music.”
When it was released in August 1952, the Anthology was hardly a sensation, but word of it spread from one musician or music lover to another, who shared it like a buried treasure, reveling in its mysteries and seeking to decode it like the Dead Sea Scrolls. By the late 1950s and early ’60s, it had become the “bible” of the folk revival, its songs staples of the repertoires of the movement’s wave of new performers. Many of the new folkies may never have listened to the Anthology itself, but they heard its songs performed by influential artists such as Dave Van Ronk and the New Lost City Ramblers, and they followed their lead. Dylan recorded several Anthology tracks on his eponymous debut album. Moreover, some of the musicians who appeared on the Anthology were not only still living but still able to perform, and their careers were resuscitated by a new young audience ready to worship at their feet. The enormous impact of the Anthology on the folk revival and popular music in general is reflected in the Chairman’s Merit Award that was presented at 1991 Grammy Awards ceremony to Smith, who accepted it saying, “I’m glad to say my dreams came true. I saw America changed by music.” And the Anthology’s legacy was further enhanced by its rerelease as a special compact disc (CD) box set in 1997.
Collector extraordinaire
Vinyl records were not the only thing collected by Smith, who considered his collecting to be but another aspect of his artistry. Among the arcane objects he collected to be stored in one or another of his succession of cramped domiciles were Ukrainian Easter eggs, tarot cards, pop-up books, gourds, and Seminole textiles. From 1961 to 1983 Smith also saved any paper airplane that he came across on New York City streets (compiling some 250), noting the location, date, and time of each discovery. If they were made from periodicals or newspapers, their folding sometimes revealed accidental poetry.
Smith also amassed a huge collection of string figures—patterned lengths of string woven or looped into geometric shapes or forms that recalled familiar objects. Many of the string figures in his collection had been created by Smith himself. He considered himself to be the world’s preeminent expert on the art form and at his death left behind a roughly 1,000-page unfinished manuscript on the subject.
Later life and work
Audio recording remained an important part of Smith’s artistic endeavours. Reminiscent of his youthful encounters with the Lummi, in 1965 he traveled to Oklahoma to record the peyote ritual songs of the Kiowa people. During the same period, back in New York, he produced the debut album of the Fugs, a quirky rock band fronted by poets Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg. In 1973, in his room at the Chelsea Hotel, Smith recorded Beat poet Allen Ginsberg as he performed songs he had written, accompanying himself on the harmonium. The result was the album First Blues: Rags, Ballads and Harmonium Songs (later rerecorded by renowned producer John Hammond).
Smith had a volatile personality. An eccentric, given to compulsive behaviour, often cantankerous, an abuser of drugs and alcohol, he reputedly could quickly become an obstreperous drunk, sometimes leading him to destroy his own work along with relationships. But his prodigious intelligence and creativity were undeniable, and some of those who appreciated his gifts were responsible for helping to support him financially, especially later in life. For a short time he lived with Ginsberg. Smith was also the beneficiary of the largesse of the Grateful Dead. Near the end of his life, he relocated to Boulder, Colorado, to serve as the “shaman-in-residence” at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute (now Naropa University). There he lectured on subjects such as alchemy and Native American cosmologies. Undertaken in New York City and Boulder, his final project, “Materials for the Study of Religion and Culture of the Lower East Side,” was a series of audio recordings that ranged from the sounds of raindrops, music on the street, and children jumping rope to the voices of Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and indigent men near death.