About the Album:
Anthology of American Folk Music was “originally released in 1952 as a quasi-legal set of three double LPs” JB covering “eighty-four American folk recordings from 1927 to 1932.” WK “This reintroduction of near-forgotten popular styles of rural American music…to new listeners had impact on American ethnomusicology” WK “could well be the most influential document of” JB “the folk & blues revival of the ‘50s and ‘60s.” WK “Many of the recordings that appeared on it had languished in obscurity for 20 years;” JB this collection “brought the works of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Mississippi John Hurt, Dick Justice and many others to the attention of” WK “a new group of folkies, from Pete Seeger to John Fahey to Bob Dylan.” JB
“The man that made the Anthology possible was Harry Smith, a notoriously eccentric musicologist.” JB Although he “considered himself an abstract-expressionist, with a special interest in film, he had a hobby of collecting old folk and country records. At a time when many people considered these records to be ephemeral, he took them seriously and accumulated a collection of several thousand recordings.” WK
To create Anthology, Smith “compiled 84 of his favorite hillbilly, gospel, blues, and Cajun performances” JB “from the period between ‘1927, when electronic recording made possible accurate music reproduction, and 1932, when the Depression halted folk music sales.’” WK He divided the music into “three categories: Ballads, Social Music, and Songs. Smith sequenced the three volumes with a great amount of care, placing songs on the Ballads volume in historical order (not to be confused with chronological order) so as to create an LP that traces the folk tradition, beginning with some of the earliest Childe ballads of the British Isles and ending with several story songs of the early 20th century.” JB “Many of the first songs are old English folk ballads, and the latter deal with the hardships of being a farmer in the 1920s. The first album of social music largely consists of music likely performed at social gatherings or dances. Many of the songs are instrumentals. The second album of social music consists of religious and spiritual songs. The final two albums of the original release consist of regular songs.” WK
“The cast of artists includes pioneers in several fields, from the Carter Family and Uncle Dave Macon to Blind Lemon Jefferson, Mississippi John Hurt, and the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers. Many of the most interesting selections on the Anthology, however, are taken from artists even more obscure, such as Clarence Ashley, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, and Buell Kazee.” JB
“Harry Smith created the liner notes himself, and these notes are almost as famous as the music. Smith also edited and directed the design of the Anthology, including an illustration by scientist/alchemist Robert Fludd on the cover. Smith also penned short synopses of the songs in the collection, which were made to resemble newspaper headlines – for the song King Kong Kitchie Kitchie Ki-Me-O by Chubby Parker, Smith notes: Zoologic Miscegeny Achieved Mouse Frog Nuptuals, Relatives Approve. Smith used a fragmented, collage method that presaged some postmodern artwork. Smith incorporated the music into his own unusual cosmology. Each of the four albums is associated with a color (Blue, Red, Green, and Yellow respectively), and an element (Water, Fire, Air, and Earth). In the 1960s, Irwin Silber replaced Smith’s covers with a Ben Shahn photograph of a poor farmer.” WK
“The Anthology originally appeared on the Folkways label established by Moses Asch.” WK After being “out of print for more than a decade, Smithsonian/Folkways reissued the set in a six-disc boxed set, with the original notes of Harry Smith, as well as a separate book of new reminiscences by artists influenced by the original and a wealth of material for use in CD-ROM drives.” JB
Notes: --
Originally released in 1952 as three separate two-album collections. The track listing reflects the CD listing in which each two-album collection was put on one CD. “In 2000, Revenant Records released a fourth collection (compiled by Smith) that includes union songs and songs recorded as late as 1940.” WK
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