Compact disc reissue

Compilation and release

Harry Smith was a West Coast filmmaker, bohemian, and eccentric, who, around 1940, developed a hobby of collecting old blues, jazz, country, Cajun, and gospel records, 78s being the only medium at the time. While mainstream America often considered these records to be ephemeral, he took them seriously and accumulated a collection of several thousand recordings, and over time began to develop an interest in seeing them preserved and curated.

In 1947, he met with Moses Asch, with an interest in selling or licensing the collection to Asch's label, Folkways Records.^[1] Smith wrote that he selected recordings from between "1927, when electronic recording made possible accurate music reproduction, and 1932, when the Depression halted folk music sales."^[2] When the Anthology was released, neither Folkways nor Smith possessed the licensing rights to these recordings, many of which had initially been issued by record companies that were still in existence, including Columbia and Paramount. The anthology thus technically qualifies as a high-profile bootleg. Folkways would later obtain some licensing rights, although the Anthology would not be completely licensed until the 1997 Smithsonian reissue.^[3]

Sequencing

The compilation was divided by Smith into three two-album volumes: "Ballads", "Social Music", and "Songs." As the title indicates, the "Ballads" volume consists of ballads, including many American versions of Child ballads originating from the English folk tradition. Each song tells a story about a specific event or time, and Smith may have made some effort to organize to suggest a historical narrative, a theory suggested by the fact that many of the first songs in this volume are old English folk ballads, while the closing songs of the volume deal with the hardships of being a farmer in the 1920s.

The first album in the "social music" volume largely consists of music likely performed at social gatherings or dances. Many of the songs are instrumentals. The second album in the "Social Music" volume consists of religious and spiritual songs. The final volume consists of regular songs, dealing with everyday life: critic Greil Marcus describes its thematic interests as being "marriage, labor, dissipation, prison, and death."^[4]

Smith's booklet in the original release makes reference to three additional planned volumes in the series, which would anthologize music up until 1950.^[2] In 2000, Revenant Records worked with the Harry Smith Archive to recreate and release a fourth volume, organized around a theme of "work" and entitled "Labor Songs." It includes a selection of union songs, and anthologizes material released as late as 1940.

Design

Smith also edited and directed the design of the Anthology. He created the liner notes himself, and these notes are almost as famous as the music, using an unusual fragmented, collage method that presaged some postmodern artwork. Smith also penned short synopses of the songs in the collection, which read like newspaper headlines—for the song "King Kong Kitchie Kitchie Ki-Me-O" by Chubby Parker, a song about a mouse marrying a frog, Smith notes: "Zoologic Miscegeny Achieved Mouse Frog nuptials, Relatives Approve."

Example from Smith's Liner Notes: #57 – The Coo Coo Bird

Each of the three two-record sets carried the same cover art, a Theodore de Bry etching of an instrument Smith referred to as the "Celestial Monochord," taken from a mystical treatise by scientist/alchemist Robert Fludd. This etching was printed over against a different color background for each volume of the set: green, blue, and red. Smith had incorporated both the music and the art into his own unusual cosmology, and each of these colors was considered by Smith to correspond to an alchemical classical element: Water, Fire, and Air, respectively.

In the 1960s, Irwin Silber replaced Smith's covers with a Ben Shahn photograph of a poor Depression-era farmer, over Smith's objections, although others have considered this a wise commercial choice in the politically charged atmosphere of the folk movement during that decade.

Compact disc reissue

In 1997, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, having acquired Folkways Records in 1986, reissued the collection on six compact discs, each disc corresponding to each album of the original set on vinyl, including replicas of Smith's original artwork and liner booklet. An additional booklet included expanded track information for each song by Jeff Place, excerpts from Invisible Republic by Greil Marcus, essays by Jon Pankake, Luis Kemnitzer, Moses Asch, and Neil Rosenberg, and tributes and appreciations by John Fahey, John Cohen, Elvis Costello, Peter Stampfel, Luc Sante, Dave Van Ronk, Eric Von Schmidt, Chuck Pirtle, and Allen Ginsberg. The back cover to this booklet closes with a quote by Smith: "I'm glad to say that my dreams came true. I saw America changed through music." At the 40th Grammy Awards, the reissue won awards for Best Album Notes and Best Historical Album.

Reception

Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic	^[5]
Robert Christgau	(A+) ^[6]

Writing for Allmusic, critic John Bush wrote the compilation "could well be the most influential document of the '50s folk revival. Many of the recordings that appeared on it had languished in obscurity for 20 years, and it proved a revelation to a new group of folkies, from Pete Seeger to John Fahey to Bob Dylan... Many of the most interesting selections on the Anthology, however, are taken from [obscure] artists... such as Clarence Ashley, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, and Buell Kazee."^[5] Music critic Robert Christgau wrote "Harry Smith's act of history... aces two very '90s concepts: the canon that accrues as rock gathers commentary, and the compilations that multiply as labels recycle catalogue. In its time, it wrested the idea of the folk from ideologues and ethnomusicologists by imagining a commercial music of everyday pleasure and alienation--which might as well have been conceived to merge with a rock and roll that didn't yet exist... Somebody you know is worth the 60 bucks it'll run you. So are you."^[6]

Influence

The Anthology has had enormous historical influence. Smith's methodology of sequencing tracks, along with his inventive liner notes, called attention to the set, imbuing it with a talismanic aura.^{[ citation needed ]} This reintroduction of near-forgotten popular styles of rural American music from the selected years to new listeners had impact on American ethnomusicology, and was both directly and indirectly responsible for the aforementioned folk music revival.

The music on the compilation provided direct inspiration to much of the emergent folk music revival movement. The Anthology made widely available music which previously had been largely the preserve of marginal social economic groups. Many people who first heard this music through the Anthology came from very different cultural and economic backgrounds from its original creators and listeners. Many previously obscure songs became standards at hootenannies and folk clubs due to their inclusion on the Anthology. Some of the musicians represented on the Anthology saw their musical careers revived, and made additional recordings and live appearances.

This document is generally thought to have been enormously influential on the folk & blues revival of the '50s and '60s, and brought the works of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Mississippi John Hurt, Dick Justice and many others to the attention of musicians such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. The "Harry Smith Anthology," as some call it, was the bible of folk music during the late 1950s and early 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene. As stated in the liner notes to the 1997 reissue, the late musician Dave van Ronk had earlier commented that "we all knew every word of every song on it, including the ones we hated."^[7]

In 2003, the album was ranked number 276 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. It is the earliest-released album on that list and also includes the oldest recordings (dating back to Uncle Dave Macon's recording of "Way Down the Old Plank Road" in April 1926).

Дата добавления: 2015-11-16