Anthology of American Folk Music
Based on Wikipedia: Anthology of American Folk Music
In 1952, a boxed set of old recordings landed with almost no fanfare. Folkways Records sold exactly fifty copies in its first year. Forty-seven went to libraries and colleges. The other three presumably went to enthusiasts with peculiar tastes.
Within a decade, that same collection would become the most influential document in the American folk revival, a kind of Rosetta Stone for musicians who would reshape popular music. Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and an entire generation of Greenwich Village folkies would memorize every word of every song—including, as one musician later said, "the ones we hated."
The Anthology of American Folk Music did something that seems almost impossible in retrospect: it changed America through music. At least, that's what its creator believed. And he may have been right.
The Collector as Alchemist
Harry Smith was not your typical record collector. He was a West Coast experimental filmmaker, a practicing magician (he preferred the archaic spelling "magickian"), and a bohemian eccentric who had been accumulating old 78 rpm records since his teenage years. Blues, jazz, country, Cajun, gospel—Smith bought them all, building an archive of sounds that the mainstream music industry had largely forgotten.
In 1947, he approached Moses Asch, founder of Folkways Records, about doing something with his collection. What emerged five years later was an eighty-four track anthology drawn from recordings made between 1926 and 1933.
Why those years specifically? Smith had a practical explanation: 1926 marked when electronic recording technology first made accurate music reproduction possible, while 1932 was when the Great Depression effectively killed the market for folk music sales. But there was something else at work too. These were the last years before radio homogenized American taste, before the recording industry consolidated around a few major labels pushing standardized sounds. Smith was capturing the final breath of a more diverse, regional American musical culture.
There was just one problem. Neither Smith nor Folkways actually owned the rights to most of these recordings. Some had been originally issued by Columbia and other major labels that were very much still in business. The Anthology was, technically speaking, a bootleg—one of the most celebrated bootlegs in music history.
Three Volumes, Three Elements
Smith divided his anthology into three two-record volumes, each with its own color and character. He called them Ballads, Social Music, and Songs.
The Ballads volume collected story-songs, many of them American versions of ancient English folk ballads. Musicologists call these Child Ballads, named after Francis James Child, the nineteenth-century Harvard professor who first catalogued them. These are songs about murders, tragic loves, supernatural encounters—the kind of tales that had been traveling the Atlantic since colonial times, picking up American details along the way. Smith seems to have arranged them to suggest a rough historical narrative, moving from the oldest English material to songs about the specific hardships of American farm life in the 1920s.
Social Music encompassed what people actually played at gatherings. The first record in this volume is heavy on dance tunes and instrumentals—the soundtrack of hoedowns and square dances. The second record shifts to the spiritual, collecting gospel songs and religious music that would have filled rural churches.
The Songs volume is harder to categorize. The music critic Greil Marcus described its contents as dealing with "marriage, labor, dissipation, prison, and death"—which is to say, the full range of human experience reduced to its essential concerns.
But Smith's organizational system went deeper than genre. Each volume received its own cover color: blue, red, and green. These weren't arbitrary choices. Smith, with his interest in the occult, assigned each color to a classical alchemical element—water, fire, and air respectively. The cover art itself came from a mystical treatise by Robert Fludd, a seventeenth-century scientist and alchemist. It depicted an instrument Smith called the Celestial Monochord, a device for tuning the music of the spheres.
This was Smith's cosmology at work. He saw connections between ancient alchemy and American folk music that would have baffled most listeners. But it gave the Anthology an aura of hidden significance, of secrets waiting to be decoded.
Liner Notes as Art Form
The liner notes that accompanied the Anthology became almost as famous as the music itself. Smith wrote them in a fragmented, collage-like style that anticipated postmodern art by decades. He included short synopses of each song written like newspaper headlines, deadpan and slightly absurd.
Consider his description of "King Kong Kitchie Kitchie Ki-Me-O," a song about a mouse marrying a frog: "Zoologic Miscegeny Achieved in Mouse Frog Nuptials, Relatives Approve."
These weren't just witty summaries. They reframed the songs, encouraged listeners to hear them differently, and suggested that this old music contained stranger and more complex stories than anyone might expect. The liner notes taught a way of listening.
The Slow Burn of Influence
The Anthology didn't become important overnight. It barely existed in the public consciousness for years. The first known press mention came in 1958, six years after release, when the folk music magazine Sing Out! published a brief piece focusing on Clarence Ashley's version of "The Coo Coo."
But among musicians, word spread differently. The collection circulated through coffee houses and folk clubs, through hootenannies—those informal folk music gatherings that were becoming increasingly popular among young people who wanted something more authentic than the pop music of the era. Songs from the Anthology became standards in these venues, taught musician to musician, absorbed into the collective repertoire of the folk revival.
The music had originally been made by and for marginalized communities—rural Southerners, African Americans, poor whites from Appalachia. The new listeners often came from very different backgrounds: urban, educated, middle-class. They were hearing this material across vast cultural and economic distances. But something translated.
Some of the original artists experienced career revivals. Mississippi John Hurt, Dock Boggs, and others were rediscovered and brought back to perform for new audiences who had first encountered them through Smith's curation. The Anthology didn't just preserve old music; it created a bridge between eras.
The Greenwich Village Bible
By the late 1950s and into the 1960s, the Anthology had achieved something like scriptural status among the folk musicians gathering in New York's Greenwich Village. Dave Van Ronk's comment about knowing every word of every song captures something essential: this wasn't casual listening. It was study, immersion, a deep dive into what seemed like an alternative America.
The collection made available music that mainstream America had either forgotten or never known. It presented a vision of the country that was wilder, stranger, and more diverse than the sanitized version broadcast on radio and television. For young musicians rebelling against the conformity of 1950s culture, here was evidence that America had once been different and might be again.
Bob Dylan absorbed the Anthology deeply. You can hear its influence throughout his early recordings—not just in specific songs he covered but in his entire approach to folk tradition. The same could be said for countless others who would go on to shape rock, country, and American roots music for decades.
Covers and Controversies
In the 1960s, when the Anthology was reissued, a dispute arose over the cover art. Irwin Silber, who oversaw the reissue, replaced Smith's alchemical imagery with a Ben Shahn photograph of a Depression-era farmer. The change infuriated Smith, who saw his carefully constructed symbolism being discarded for something more politically direct.
But others considered it a wise commercial choice. The 1960s folk revival was deeply political, connected to the civil rights movement and growing opposition to the Vietnam War. A stark image of American poverty spoke to that moment in ways that seventeenth-century mysticism did not.
The tension between these two approaches—folk music as spiritual mystery versus folk music as political statement—ran through the revival itself. Smith's vision embraced the strange and inexplicable; the political folkies wanted songs that could change the world. Both impulses could claim the Anthology as their source.
Recognition and Revival
The Anthology's importance eventually became official. In 1997, Smithsonian Folkways issued a comprehensive six-CD reissue that restored Smith's original artwork and expanded the documentation. At the 1998 Grammy Awards, it won for Best Historical Album and Best Album Notes.
In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked it number 276 on their list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. It holds a peculiar distinction on that list: it's the earliest released album to make the cut, and its oldest recordings—Uncle Dave Macon's "Way Down the Old Plank Road" from April 1926—are the most ancient sounds to appear on any album in the countdown.
In 2005, the Library of Congress inducted it into the National Recording Registry, designating it as "culturally, aesthetically, or historically significant." It joined the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2012.
A fourth volume finally appeared in 2000, eight years after Smith's death. Titled Labor Songs, it extended the anthology's timeframe to include material recorded as late as 1940, focusing on work songs and union music. Its cover was yellow, representing earth—completing the alchemical elemental scheme that Smith had always intended.
The B-Sides and Their Problems
In 2020, the archival label Dust-to-Digital released a companion collection: The Harry Smith B-Sides, containing the flip sides of the original 78s that Smith had used. It was a fascinating document of what Smith had chosen not to include.
But the release also drew criticism. Some songs were omitted because of racist or offensive content in their lyrics—raising questions about how we handle historical material that reflects the prejudices of its time. The folk music that Smith collected came from an America that was deeply segregated and often casually cruel. Preserving that history means confronting its uglier dimensions.
The Anthology's Strange Afterlife
Music critics have noted something peculiar about the Anthology's reputation. For years it existed in relative obscurity, known intensely by a small community but largely invisible to the broader public and to academia. Then, rather suddenly in the 1990s, it emerged as a canonical document—without much transition between those two states.
Part of this shift came from important books by Robert Cantwell and Greil Marcus (the latter's Invisible Republic, later retitled The Old, Weird America) that gave the collection academic and critical legitimacy. Part came from the Smithsonian reissue making it newly available and newly visible. And part came from a growing sense that American music needed to reckon with its roots, that the homogenization of culture had gone too far and something had been lost.
In 2006, a tribute album appeared featuring Beck, Nick Cave, Elvis Costello, Lou Reed, Sonic Youth, Wilco, and others covering songs from the original anthology. The list of contributors demonstrated how far the Anthology's influence had spread—from alternative rock to country to art-punk to singer-songwriter traditions. The old weird America had become a shared reference point for musicians who agreed on little else.
What Smith Saw
Harry Smith lived long enough to see his collection recognized. In the liner notes to the 1997 reissue, one of his quotes appears: "I'm glad to say that my dreams came true. I saw America changed through music."
It's a remarkable claim. Most cultural artifacts aspire to reflect their moment, not to transform it. But Smith had assembled something that worked on listeners in unexpected ways. By presenting music from a forgotten America—strange, diverse, often disquieting—he had given people permission to imagine different futures.
The Anthology didn't just preserve the past. It created a usable past, one that subsequent generations could draw on, argue with, reimagine. That's a rare achievement for any work of curation, let alone for a bootleg compilation that sold three copies to non-libraries in its first year.
The music still sounds marvelous and uncanny, as the New York Times put it. Uncle Dave Macon's banjo, Blind Lemon Jefferson's blues, the raw harmonies of Appalachian ballad singers—these sounds have lost none of their power to surprise. They remind us that American music was once weirder, wilder, and more various than any single tradition could contain.
That may be Harry Smith's real legacy: not just the songs he collected but the vision he offered of America as a place of hidden depths and strange connections, where a magician-filmmaker could find ancient mysteries in a pile of old records and share them with anyone willing to listen.