Harry Smith vs Allen Lomax

But more importantly, yes Smith because even when he did his thing at that early date he had no truck w/ genre definitions. He was like Chuck Eddy 30 years earlier! But seriously, as invaluable a contribution the Lomax made, I have to respect a guy who had the perserverance and the vision to release something like the Anthology. Let's face it, Allen had everything dropped into his lap thanks to his father. And he really didn't do much - in spite of the amazing material he documented - to break down pat ideas about genre and "folk music" in general.

But seriously, Heaven and Earth Magic - try to see it.

The HSA fit in well with certain contemporary rockcrit ideas, esp. the renunciation of any idea of untainted folk music as apart from commerce/commercial music. Several people brought up the fact that Harry collected commercial 78s for inclusion on his set, not field recordings. The overwhelming rightness and authority of the HSA allowed them to establish connections (in spirit) between this prewar commercial music and latterday commercial music.

Implicit in some such comments was a putdown or perhaps just a sidelining of folk purism and the impulse to collect field recordings, make "discoveries" etc. Actually, of the seminar's participants, only Greil Marcus can really be characterized as making any such argument. But it is his imprimatur that was placed on the HSA thanks to his liner essay and his advocacy of the set in many publications; and his relatively high profile in the rock world of course. And I think some of the ideas that he's floated about in Invisible Republic and elsewhere have become cant (not thanks to him alone of course).

Something like this was addressed in the Atlantic article, which contrasted the outpouring of enthusiasm over Harry Smith to the relative neglect of the life's work of Lomax. At that point Lomax was ill, having recent suffered a stroke. His most recent project, the Global Jukebox, was in disarray. A lack of funding had caused the project to move so slowly that by the time it was ready for public consumption, the technology involved was outdated. His office and archives at Hunter College were by some reports in disarray. Rounder had just barely begun their ambitious Lomax Collection program.

Lomax had long been the object of gripes about the power imbalance soom perceived to be inherent in the collection/(re)discovery process, gripes which would be more properly aimed at his dad, John Lomax (with whom Alan had a falling-out over the elder's treatment of Lead Belly). He was also the victim of some of his own half-baked ideas (all of which, I think, had their root in a very positive impulse): cantometrics and the Global Jukebox.

I don't mean to overstate the difference in the receptions of these two figures. Certainly the Rounder series has brought renewed attention to Lomax, and as the previous posts on this thread suggest, people are still aware of his contributions. But c. 1997 the situation was a bit more troubling.

But in short. Harry's contribution was making the greatest mix tape ever, and going a long ways toward establishing a canon (a wonderful canon, but one that might be challenged more than it is at present) for "American Folk Music" which was enormously important to the folk revival. His unusual and oft-perverse liner notes were a thing of wonder in themselves, but seem to contribute to the "othering" of the music in question, a project furthered by Marcus's "old, weird America" formulation. Lomax: recorded and (re)discovered and brought to public attention a staggering number of incredible musicians around the globe, most famously in the Southern USA. Helped to liberate the study of folk music from the sort of ballad-obsessed scholarship that dominated through the 1920s, and from the paternalism of his father and others. Helped to pioneer ethnomusicology, even if his specific contributions have dubious value, the seriousness with which he approached the music and its relation to society has been a model for generations of critics and scholars. Etc.

And Lomax was not the myopic purist of some people's imaginings. One of my college friends had worked for him at Hunter College, and said that on one occassion as they were walking back from lunch, he spied a group of Afro-American teenagers freestyling on the block. This elderly, corpulent, schleppily-dressed white wandered right into the circle of teenagers and stood there, lending a keen ear to their improvisations. When he came back to my friend he said, "Amazing!" Lomax was forever suspicious of the major record labels and so on (although his Sounds of the South series came out on Atlantic), but he was no hidebound purist.

I'm running out of steam here, and I'm at work so I can't go on too long. Sorry that my thoughts above are so discursive and disconnected.

thoroughly enjoyed those comments amateurist!

Mississippi records out of Portland is selling a fancy vinyl version of the Harry Smith collection:

PLEASE NOTE THE ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN FOLK MUSIC PRE-ORDER PRICE IS NO LONGER APPLICABLE.
IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO ORDER THE ANTHOLOGY IT COSTS $140 WITH DOMESTIC SHIPPING

Let's see that psychedelic Wizard of Oz footage! Sort of silly that in this day and age Harry Smith's great lost work hasn't leaked in SOME way on the internet.

Reviving this because I liked amateurist's post.

great thread! lots to mull on.

Yes, and where the hell is Amateurist? Hopefully all over some of the many threads I no longer keep up with. Lomax was v. venturesome: for instance, I've got a cassette of Italian songs, recorded on the Adriatic coast, I think, with quite a mix of associations. Smith was thee exemplary dumpster diver, but very specifically that and a specialist in his goals, incl/ shaping a certain presentation: as has been noted, a pattern fan and patternmaster, as seen in those films in w the box, if you got it when you had CD-ROM capabilty.
The commercial aspect is easy to forget, in that these original 78s were mostly rough-sounding solo sit-down sessions, sometimes in a hotel room, like w Robert Johnson, and interest-wise, mainly for a niche market, of listeners in and from the hills etc., also I take it for some academics and other highbrows, some artists and music junkies/aural foodies, tiny circles of those last. Far from say the "Father of Country Music," Jimmie Rodgers, the traveler/songster/jukebox minstrel, also like Johnson in live practice, but unlike Johnson in wider-ranging discography, with bluesy originals and covers of vaudeville and valentine cheese and at least posing in blackface, though saving the yodel from minstrel show experience, also recording w Louis Armstrong----not so much of this traveling in Smith's selection (nor the campy Hillbilly Corn trend to come, as discussed by Thomas Pycnchon, for instance, in his liner notes for the excellent Spiked! The Music of Spike Jones:
https://thomaspynchon.com/thomas-pynchon-liner-notes-for-spiked-the-music-of-spike-jones/
Wonder what Smith and Lomax thought of Spike Jones?

The film Shirley brings them both together: Leadbelly's "The Gallis Pole" (Lomax) and Clarence Ashley's "The House Carpenter" (Smith)--both played inside a classroom, of all things.

Whoah! Please describe scene!
xp"jukebox minstrel"! Shouldn't have said that it before mention of minstrel shows, but this "minstrel" meant in the original up-to-date and golden-oldies human jukebox sense: you better be ready with that stuff if the audience, esp. the drinking-dancing one, gets enough of the sensitive folk ballads and originals.

It's two different scenes, neither on YouTube.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374282240/cosmicscholar this looks interesting

That Swzed book on Harry Smith does look interesting.

The Whitney Museum in NYC is having a Harry Smith exhibit that opens October 4, 2023,and runs to or through January 2024

https://whitney.org/exhibitions/harry-smith?fbclid=IwAR2TYyXT1Tf2gI6bTwSzJN79m5UBBHh0lSrlz4siq9EYsFO93rNLMibg0pc&mibextid=Zxz2cZ

did people really still say "afro-american" in 2003? My memory fades.

also, that sounds sweet, marking my calendar

About 40 pages into the Swzed biography. It was Smith's centenary this year--don't recall any mention of it anywhere, though I'm sure there was. I always say this and never follow through, but I will make an effort to re-listen to his magnum opus, which I downloaded and burned soon after it was rereleased.

There are a bunch of out-of-print boxes I burned in the early 2000s when I didn't have money that I'd be happy to pay a reasonable price for now.

I'd buy it too if I found a good price. I guess "reasonable" is a subjective call...it's still over $100 on Amazon, before shipping or exchange or anything else.

folkways has it for sale at a standard price: https://folkways.si.edu/anthology-of-american-folk-music/african-american-music-blues-old-time/music/album/smithsonian

looking forward to reading the Szwed, picked it up yesterday at my local. Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith opens at the Whitney tomorrow:

Harry Smith (1923–1991), was a painter, filmmaker, folklorist, musicologist, and collector as well as a radical nonconformist whose work defies categorization. Although his creative output includes paintings, films, poetry, music, and sound recordings, it also consists of extensive collections of overlooked yet revealing objects, such as string figures and found paper airplanes. His best-known work, a compilation of recordings from the 1920s and 1930s titled the Anthology of American Folk Music, achieved cultlike status among many musicians and listeners since it was first published in 1952.

Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith puts the artist's life on display alongside his art and collections. It follows him from an isolated Depression-era childhood in the Pacific Northwest—a time when he was immersed in ecstatic religious philosophies and Native American ceremony—to his bohemian youth of marijuana, peyote, and intellectualism in postwar Berkeley, California. The exhibition also traces his path through the milieus of bebop and experimental cinema in San Francisco to his decades in New York, where he was an essential part of the city's avant-garde fringe.

Keenly attuned to changing technology, Smith embraced innovation and used whatever was new and of the moment. At the same time, his lifelong interest in abstract art, ancient traditions, metaphysics, spiritualism, folk art, and world music came to the fore even as he devised ingenious ways of collecting sounds and creating films. These concerns make Smith's work feel increasingly prescient as collecting and sharing come into view as creative acts that are necessary for drawing meaning from the glut of images and juxtaposition of cultures we encounter every day.

https://whitney.org/exhibitions/harry-smith

oh, and John Zorn has an ensemble soundtracking some of Smith's films on 10/20-21:

https://whitney.org/events/john-zorn-harry-smith

xp thanks, I thought it was totally out of print.

Two-thirds of the way through the biography. For me, it's dragged in spots--descriptions of films I haven't seen, his esoteric anthropological work--but I love this line from David Amram: "He began like a college professor on a field trip and then became the field trip."