The ballad is by someone who refers to himself as “a mountain boy,” and, accompanied only by a banjo, this is what he sang: “I courted a fair young lady/What was her name, I did not know.”
He courted a woman whose name he did not know? The mystery deepens as the song proceeds: “Oh, I’d rather be in some dark holler/Where the sun refuse to shine/As for you to be some other man’s woman/Never longer to call you mine.” The voice is prayerful but restrained, almost deadpan. It offers clues about the singer’s state of mind, the reasons for his obsession, but no clear-cut answers: Is the scenario he describes some kind of cruel joke? Is she a phantasm? Is he nuts?
The singer is Buell Kazee, from Burton Fork, Ky., and his is one of 84 performances collected on the “Anthology of American Folk Music,” a six-record set that originally appeared in 1952 and is now available on compact disc for the first time, in a lavish edition issued by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.
In his new book, “Invisible Republic” (Henry Holt), on the creation of the “Basement Tapes” by Bob Dylan and future members of The Band, critic Greil Marcus describes the anthology as not only the inspiration for the “Basement Tapes” sessions, but the “founding document” of the folk revival that took place in the 1950s and ’60s. It is a huge claim, one that leaps past the groundwork laid by musicologists and musicians such as Woody Guthrie, the Weavers and John and Alan Lomax–whose recordings of blues shouts, chain-gang chants and cotton-field spirituals are also being reissued this year on CD by Rounder Records.
But there is little doubt that music as we know it would not be the same if an eccentric record collector named Harry Smith had not pieced together the “Anthology” from long-forgotten 78 r.p.m. recordings issued commercially from 1926 to ’34. The tremor started by “Anthology’s” release continues to reverberate, most prominently in the recent music of Bruce Springsteen, whose “The Ghost of Tom Joad” attempts to convey the unflinching horror heard in the voices of such long-lost “Anthology” singers as “Dock” Boggs.
The Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia, the Lovin Spoonful’s John Sebastian, Elvis Costello, John Fahey, Nanci Griffith, Ry Cooder, Beck and, of course, Dylan and The Band, as well as countless others have made “Anthology” a cornerstone in their musical development. Smith’s work may be the true “basement tapes,” a record of antique songs made by forgotten singers that sounds positively postmodern in 1997.
Smith not only was an astute judge of music, he had a knack for seeing how the disparate music he loved–gospel hymns, blues hollers, celebratory Cajun fiddle tunes, hillbilly yodels, solemn murder ballads–fit together. He didn’t categorize the music by race or style; instead he sequenced the “Anthology” according to themes, both lyrical and musical, and drew connections between artists and forms that, at the time, were revolutionary.
In an elaborate book accompanying the original recording (and reproduced on the new CD set), he created a post-modern collage-like design that had little to do with accepted notions of what folk music was, offered a bibliography documenting his extensive research, and with extraordinary wit and chutzpah provided pithy, tabloid-headline summaries of the songs, many of which were densely worded metaphysical tales that defied such casual reduction: “Theft of Stetson Hat causes deadly dispute. Victim identifies self as family man” (for the classic “Stackalee”); “Gaudy woman lures child from playfellows; stabs him as victim dictates message to parents” (“Fatal Flower Garden”).
The set includes a number of major artists, such as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Sleepy John Estes and the Carter Family, but it’s populated largely by misfits, oddities and obscurities who adopted the voices of presidential assassins, drunkards, murderers, train men, psychotics and widowers. It captures a vision of another, different America than had been depicted in most folk music available in the early ’50s. As Marcus writes, Smith created a mythical village “whose citizens are not distinguished by race. There are no masters and no slaves. The prison population is large, and most are part of it at one time or another.”
In Marcus’ “Smithville,” everyday life is transformed into myth or revealed as a joke.
It was a vision of a secret Americana that resonated first among a few hard-core collectors and denizens of the emerging urban folk scenes, then seeped into the rock ‘n’ roll culture that would redefine mainstream thinking in the ’60s.
“Think about the musical climate in the cities at that time (1952),” says John Cohen, a member of the seminal folk group the New Lost City Ramblers and a Yale University student at the time of the release of Smith’s anthology. “Rock ‘n’ roll wasn’t out yet, rhythm and blues was barely heard, and folk music was the Weavers and Woody Guthrie. It definitely wasn’t this thing that Harry Smith came up with. It opened all sorts of doors by exploding the definition of what folk music was. It put into question everything we heard, and the music we were making. `If this is American music, than what are we?’ “
Indeed, what must listeners raised on “This Land Is Your Land” have made of Uncle Dave Macon, “the Dixie Dew Drop,” born in Smart Station, Tenn., in 1870, as he throttled “Way Down the Old Plank Road”? Here he was well into his 50s, making his first professional recordings, and even now the lifetime of pentup frustration, fear, joy and energy he released is audible. Spurred by furious clog dancing, banjo and guitar, Macon assumes the voice of a wagoneer driving his horses with maniacal glee. “Kill yo’ self!” he hollers at his charges, trying to keep a few paces ahead of the music that surges behind him, threatening to swallow him whole.
And how did the young city folkies first relate to “Dock” Boggs on “Country Blues”? It’s a song so dire, so drenched in fatalism, that it sounds as if the singer will turn a gun on himself to ease his life of constant torture: “Corn whiskey has surrounded my body, poor boy, and pretty women is a-troublin’ my mind.”
Cohen was so intrigued with what he heard that he sought out Boggs, who released a handful of records, than disappeared into the coal mines for 30 years so that he could make enough money to care for his ailing wife. “When we first heard him, our reaction was, `Does this voice come from Earth?’ ” Cohen recalls. “But we found him and got to know him as a person. He was an open, straightforward man, but he did tell some weird stories. He’d say, `My father was an upright man. He lived upright, and he died upright. They hung him.’ “
Cohen says that strange humor, that otherness, was key to understanding Smith’s vision. “Harry gave America permission to be weird,” Cohen says, and the music raises as many intriguing questions about Smith as it does the everyday people who made it.
“No one was pals with Harry –he was just an obscure kind of guy,” says Phil Elwood, a veteran music writer and deejay in Berkeley, Calif., who got to know Smith hanging around the legendary Yerba Buena record store in Oakland during the late ’40s. “Most of us were hunting down traditional jazz and blues recordings, but Harry was paying attention to a totally different area. To us, he was collecting crazy stuff, but he did his homework, he had his lists. He was a bit of a freak, and most of us didn’t understand until later what he was doing. When the `Anthology’ came out, it was designed to shock, but those of us who knew him weren’t completely shocked. We said, `That’s Harry.’ “
After drifting through San Francisco, Smith moved to New York, where he lived until his death at 68 in 1991. Besides collecting records, he made hand-painted avant-garde films that influenced the work of the Monty Python comedy troupe, among others, and had his paintings exhibited at the Louvre. He experimented with hallucinogenic drugs and during one screening of his films listed in the program the vision-inducing substances that inspired each work.
He was always studying or tinkering with something–American Indian rituals, patchwork quilts, painted Easter eggs, paper airplanes–and received a number of grants. But to survive he had to borrow money from his friends, who rarely turned him down, even though they knew they would not be repaid. In ’91, he received a Lifetime Achievement Grammy that finally acknowledged the cultural resonance of his “Anthology.”
“I’m glad to say that my dreams came true,” Smith said in accepting his award. “I saw America changed through music.”
It sounded like a capstone to a movement, but Cohen thinks differently: “What needs to be emphasized is that his ideas were lived, that people spent their lives and continue to spend their lives pursuing the ideas in the `Anthology.’ He set the tone for the counter-culture because he was out there long before there was such a thing.”
