By chance I stumbled across the Anthology of American Folk Music through the leading purveyors of music preservation, Barnes & Noble. These field recordings double as fascinating anthropological studies of early American history - there's something so unobtrusive about this music...Kind of strange considering our modern techniques for recording, things will never sound like this again.
"The Anthology has had enormous historical influence. [Harry] Smith's methodology of sequencing tracks, along with his inventive liner notes, called attention to the set, imbuing it with a talismanic aura. 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.""
Knowing that Harry Smith compiled this collection and was the savior of folk music, take a look at this video he made in the 40's and tell me how people can exist on such diametrically opposing planes of the universe.
Some things I just can not comprehend...
2 comments:
I remember when you wowed me with that Harry Smith vid a while back. I had no idea he was also such an archivist.
I owe him a debt of gratitude for preserving Mississippi John Hurt, I really love that guy's music.
Have you heard any of Alan Lomax's recordings? He's also a really phenomenal folk archivist - his book Land Where the Blues Began is defiantly worth checking out
“And the thing that I always tried to do with important singers when I met them was to sit down and record everything they knew, give them a first real run-through of their art.”
Post a Comment