Anthology of American Folk Music (1997)

Anthology of American Folk Music is a three-volume compilation album released in August 1952 by Folkways Records. It was compiled by American polymath Harry Smith from his own collection of 78 rpm records. It consists of eighty-four recordings of American folk, blues and country music made and issued from 1926 to 1933 by a variety of performers, divided into three categories: "ballads", "social music", and "songs".

The anthology sold relatively poorly, with no notable early coverage besides a minor mention in Sing Out! in 1958. However, it eventually became regarded as a landmark and influential release, particularly for the 1950s and 1960s American folk music revival. In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked it at number 276 on their list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. In 2005, it was inducted into the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress.

Background

Harry Smith was a West Coast filmmaker, magickian and bohemian eccentric. As a teenager he started collecting old blues, jazz, country, Cajun, and gospel records and accumulated a large collection of 78s, those being the only medium at the time.

In 1947, he met with Moses Asch, with an interest in selling or licensing the collection to Asch's label, Folkways Records. Smith wrote that he selected recordings from between "1927, when electronic recording made possible accurate music reproduction, and 1932, when the Great Depression halted folk music sales." When the Anthology was released, neither Folkways nor Smith possessed the licensing rights to these recordings, some of which had initially been issued by record companies that were still in existence, including Columbia. 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. Asch had a "reputation for releasing copyrighted songs without going through the proper legal channels."

Sequencing

Smith divided the collection into three, two record volumes: Ballads, Social Music, and Songs. The first volume consists of ballads including many American versions of Child Ballads taken 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 them 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 deal with the hardships of being a farmer in the 1920s.

The first record in the Social Music volume mostly consists of music that was likely performed at social gatherings and dances with many of the songs being instrumentals. The second record in the volume consists of religious and spiritual songs, including some Gospel songs.

The volume of Songs consists of regular songs, dealing with everyday life. Critic Greil Marcus describes them as being about "marriage, labor, dissipation, prison, and death."

Smith's booklet in the original release refers to three additionally planned volumes made up of music up until 1950. Although none were released during his lifetime, a fourth volume was released posthumously in 2000. Entitled Labor Songs, this volume centers around work songs and union songs. The album contains later material than the original three volumes, anthologizing material recorded as late as 1940.

Design

Smith himself designed and edited the anthology and wrote the liner notes, which are almost as well known as the music, using an unusual fragmented, collage method that presaged some postmodern artwork. He also penned short synopses of the songs 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 in Mouse Frog Nuptials, Relatives Approve."

Each of the three sets carries 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. The etching is printed over a different color background for each volume of the set: blue, red and green. Smith incorporated both the music and the art into his own unusual cosmology. He considered each of these colors as corresponding to an alchemical classical element: water, fire, and air, respectively. The fourth Labour volume (released later by Revenant) is colored yellow to represent the element earth.

Release and reissues

Folkways originally released the Anthology as three double-LP boxed sets in August 1952. It sold relatively poorly initially. By 1953, Folkways had sold only fifty albums, forty-seven of which went to libraries and colleges and for a time, it was out of print because of copyright issues.