"God bless your children, I'll take care of your wife..." Stackalee, Frank Hutchinson, Okeh Records No. 45106, Anthology Of American Folk Music, edited by Harry Smith
Bearded and wild-haired and twisted by rickets, he was a short man. He planned to initiate a magical transformation of the world. He would do this by using eighty-four recordings, precisely and meticulously arranged by himself as editor of a musical potpourri. These songs would generate a specific sequence of tones which altered consciousness...
Each of the songs that would be included in the Anthology of American Folk Music was already fairly old by recording industry standards when Harry Smith had a vague notion, circa 1940, to start collecting scratchy 78s that captured sounds from a rural America which even then existed only in stories told by old people who yammered about those good old days before indoor plumbing and electricity. He was seventeen years old and living not far from Seattle in South Bellingham in the lovely state of Washington...
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| Harry Smith, circa 1965 |
Nearly thirty years later, he told interviewer John Cohen how he got into the business of creating aural alchemies, saying a recording by a Mississippi bluesman named Tommy McClennan had "somehow gotten into this town by mistake"...
It is probably destiny this music from the Mississippi Delta found its way into young Mr Smith's hands. Harry, after all, was likely the only lad in that specific part of the Pacific Northwest whose mother claimed to be Anastasia, last of the Romanovs, this despite the fact that her own mother had been a school teacher in Alaska...
Or the only one trying to decide if his father was the infamous English Alistair Crowley, practitioner extraordinaire of the Dark Arts, or that fishing cannery night watchman who lived with mom. He may have been the only young white man in the Pacific Northwest who wanted to be a Native American shaman while he struggled with his own homosexuality. As Harry dealt with such personal dilemmas, he began to gather paper airplanes made by others. This odd hobby became the largest privately held collection of its kind ever assembled and, decades later, found its way to the National Air and Space Museum...
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| Tommy McClennan |
Whatever led Harry Smith to find McClennan's record led him to a Salvation Army Thrift Shop in Seattle. There, he discovered Uncle Dave Macon singing "Fox and Hounds" for an audience very different than Tommy McClennan's but somehow the same...
Smith was awestruck by what heard in these old white hillbilly and black sharecropper blues. He scoured the countryside for more music that sounded totally different from anything on the radio playlists in the early 1940s. World War II came along. And that meant warehouses had to be cleared out to make way for military supplies. In turn, this put many long-forgotten 78s appeared on record store clearance racks for a fraction of the original price. Harry added hundreds of titles to his collection...
He was now a student (for five semesters between 1943 and 1944) at the University of Washington. Many of his professors saw the young anthropology undergrad as a semi-peer. This high esteem indirectly resulted from his delusional mother's job teaching school on the Lummi reservation. As a boy, Harry spent as much time as possible with these Native Peoples whose ancestors gathered berries and reef-fished salmon. One of the earliest photographs of Smith shows him, at age 15, tape-recording a Lummi ceremony. He learned the language, customs, and religion of this coastal Salish tribe and wanted to be a shaman...
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| Members of the Lummi Nation, circa 1915 |
During his year or so in college, Smith traveled to San Francisco for the first time. He attended a Woody Guthrie concert. And he fell in with some bohemian painters and poets during his visit to Baghdad by the Bay. They introduced him to a world of ideas concepts he hadn't stumbled across in Washington State. Herbal experimentation taught him why jazz musicians were said to favor marijuana...
San Francisco proved a turning point. He returned to school so he could leave it and return to the Bay Area. He began to toy around with filmmaking, using combinations of stop-motion and hand-painting techniques of his own devising. San Fran's Museum of Modern Art showed his work. The strange little man moved comfortably in an esoteric world of California's avant-garde cinema...
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| Artwork by Harry Smith: Algo Bueno, circa 1951 |
He caught the eye of New York museum director Hilla Rebay who was impressed by his canvas work. She arranged for him to receive a Guggenheim grant in 1950. Smith, not one for sedentary lifestyles, packed his bags and moved to the Big Apple where he became friends with jazzman Dizzy Gillespie (known for his bent trumpet) and beat poet Allen Ginsberg (known for poems like Howl and Kaddish)...
Whenever he worked, be it with paint or celluloid, Smith immersed himself in music, gradually seeing correspondences between color and sound, sound and movement...
Mystical thinking came naturally to Harry Smith. His parents were Theosophists of a pantheistical variety. Some families talk about the work day or sports or news at the dinner table. The Smiths chatted about universal truths contained within all religions but obscured by dogma. One might expect this of them. Harry's paternal grandfather helped form an offshoot of mainstream Freemasonry. The group saw itself as the new Knights Templars, despite a lack of Saracens to be fought or Grails to be sought in the farm country of turn-of-the-century Iowa. Gramps also claimed to have been one of Ulysses S Grant's key aides during the Civil War...
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| Harry Smith's grandmother once managed a school in Alaska which received funding from the Russian government. This fact led Smith's mother to believe she herself was actually the Grand Duchess Anastasia, rightful heiress to the throne of "All the Russias." |
In the early 1950s, Smith became acquainted with Moses Asch, founder of Folkways Records and son of novelist Sholem Asch, Yiddish language writer. Asch was born in Poland like his father. At eight, Moses was living in Brooklyn, dreaming about Robin Hood and Jesse James. He was also developing a strong distrust of local police who fired live rounds to scare neighborhood kids...
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| Moe Asch in his office |
The Great Depression found him hammering equipment and storage shelves for radio stations. Asch, like Harry Smith, fanatically collected blues and mountain music. The next step was to create his own independent record label and showcase work by Josh White, Leadbelly, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and other artists not quite at home in corporate environments. His friendship and support of these singers soon made him a leading figure in the political Old Left of American politics...
Asch suggested Harry compile an anthology of roots and blues music to be issued on the Folkways label...
Smith did just that. At this point, his interest in old music dovetailed perfectly with his occult inclinations. He had already formulated a theory about the link between sound and color, aural and visual stimuli. A voracious reader, Harry Smith studied the works, theories, and lives of the English alchemists Robert Fludd and John Dee. Particularly influential was Fludd's concept of a "celestial monochord," a stringed instrument meant to link musical intervals to the astronomer Ptolemy's earth-centered theory of the Universe...
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| In 1618, alchemist Robert Fludd linked Ptolemy's vision of the universe with the musical intervals of an instrument known as a monochord. Harry Smith was heavily influenced by Fludd's ideas and featured the "celestial monochord" on the cover of the first edition of the Anthology in 1952. |
The Anthology, Smith realized, offered a perfect opportunity to choose a sequence of tones that would initiate a change of consciousness in listeners and impel them toward working for social change. He further decided the music that could do this had been recorded between the years 1927 and 1932.
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| The cover of a re-issued edition of the "Anthology" features a 17th Century alchemist's drawing |
To those hearing the anthology for the first time, the music is not a collection of old tunes...
It is a rollercoaster rattling and clanking down Appalachian mountain hollows, taking jackknife turns past Cajun dancehalls, zipping in and through broken windows in shantytowns on the wrong side of the tracks...
Now it becomes a mystical lizard and a stolen locomotive, whooping and hollering. It shouts glory, glory, hallelujah and races the Angel of Death. Somewhere, it becomes a cotton picking ghost. Next it transforms itself into a lost cowboy on desert plains. Lo and behold! Then it morphs into a steamship on its way to meet an iceberg in the North Atlantic...
Turning back into a train, it pulls into Spencer right on time so the conductor can drop Parson Brown off at Bootleg Sam's ginhouse. And then...
It's a rollercoaster again...
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| Rural West Virginia coal miner Frank Hutchison crossed racial musical lines with his version of the story of the notorious black gambler Stagger Lee |
Only a fool would try to accurately summarize the eighty four songs on the Anthology. It opens with coal miner Dick Justice singing about the murder of Henry Lee by a woman who schemes to kill a talking bird who witnessed her perfidy. Later, we meet Old Dog Blue, remembered by Mississippi medicine show performer Jim Jackson. Cold hearted Stagger Lee slays Billy de Lyon over a John B Stetson hat. Blind Lemon Jefferson asks but one kind of favor from us: that his grave be kept clean. A husband and wife shake tambourines and whoop out the fate of the Titanic. Outlaws confess their crimes on the steps of the gallows...
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| Anthology of poems by Smith friend Allen Ginsberg |
Completed, published, and distributed, the Anthology of American Folk Music did not set sales records. Shop owners tended to put the three volume, six LP set on dusty back shelves. Where it languished until a young Bob Dylan or Joan Baez or Dave von Ronk happened on it by complete accident...
Once heard, the Anthology had a definite effect on young folkies. Pleasant harmonies and antiseptic lyrics about murderers like Tom Dooley as sung the clean-cut Kingston Trio just wouldn't cut it anymore. Even harder edged stuff by the Almanac Singers, the Weavers, and other devout Old Lefters had nothing to say to awakened souls ignited by Smith's ditties collection. It literally became a musical Bible for restless folk looking to end war, racism and the inequities of capitalism...
Unless a person is familiar with the history of American popular music, particularly its folk movements, it is impossible to comprehend the impact of the Anthology on its audience. One listener-- Peter Stampfel of the Holy Modal Rounders-- exulted that the Anthology was "the Touchstone, the Grail, The Real Deal, The Nitty Gritty, Ground Zero," adding if God were a DJ, He'd be Harry Smith...
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| A Harry Smith friend: Jazz trumpeter extraordinaire Dizzy Gillespie |
Dave von Ronk who recorded an iconic version of "The House of the Rising Sun" spoke at Smith's memorial in 1992: "I didn't know Harry very well. I made it a point to avoid him unless I was drunk... But I am here to acknowledge a debt of honor that I, and my whole generation, owe to Harry because of that anthology, which was the Bible for hundreds of us, or more. Without (it), a whole of things never would have happened in this country musically"...
Another prominent 60s folkie, Eric von Schmidt, described the Anthology: "This music sounded like it came right out of the ground. Songs like the clods of rich dark earth, fecund, timeless"...
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| Harry Smith sometimes suspected English magician Alistair Crowley was his father. A recent biographer has opined the so-called "Wickedest Man in the World" (believed by his own mother to be the Great Beast foretold in Revelations) was, in fact, a British secret agent who used his bizarre antics to disguise his service to England. |
Allen Ginsberg also remembered his panhandling pal: "The amazing thing was that in the last year of his life he was awarded a Grammy for the advancement of folk music. He was dressed up in a tuxedo without a tie, and he stumbled trying to climb on the stage. He was given a moment to make a speech and said very briefly that he was happy to live long enough to see the American political culture affected and moved and shaped somewhat by American folk music"....
Perhaps Harry Smith was right. Listening to the Anthology over and over, Bob Dylan penned "Blowin' in the Wind" and created a perfect anthem for a generation that asked, along with him, how many years can those wicked cannonballs fly until they are forever banned...
From the Anthology of American Folk Music: Frank Hutchison: "Stackalee": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXoq77Y9ijc
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| Bob Dylan, seen here with Allen Ginsberg, once attempted to introduce himself to Harry Smith but was turned away by the eccentric anthologist. |
NEWS CORRAL:
Dry weather isn't the only threat to the nation's food supply.
William Peck examines the problem of aging farm ownership in the United States. Of particular interest to Texans is the rapid population growth along the I-35 corridor and points east. A tremendous amount of land which is actually suitable for farming is rapidly disappearing in the wake of urban development. This has implications for the entire agricultural industry in the nation:
LRNARTS UPDATE
Artwork by Louis R Nugent now available: For fine art prints and greeting cards, visit: http://louis-nugent.artistwebsites.com/
Fine Arts America now features West Texas painting, drawings, and photographs by Karen Boudreaux of Houston, Texas, Ken Brown Pioneer of Sand Springs, Oklahoma, Joe JAKE Pratt of Kerrville, Texas, David Pike of Lubbock, Texas, Judi Bagwell of Greenwell Springs, Louisiana, and Louis R Nugent of San Angelo, Texas at: http://fineartamerica.com/groups/west-texas.html?tab=overview
CREDITS
Note: All photographs for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia, without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: Moe Asch in his office from the Smithsonian Institution Folklife Center, Allen Ginsberg Poetry Anthology from Penguin Books, and Frank Hutchison publicity photo from the University of North Carolina
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