#FOLK MUSIC COLLECTOR SERIES#

Many of these songs are variations on traditional compositions with no single author, and many rural musicians signed their rights over to the recording company or to the record executive who recruited them.) Yet Smith’s singular vision for the “Anthology”-his particular and irregular cosmology-is part of what makes it such a fascinating artifact. (The question of who owns the music, and how the descendants of the performers should be compensated if a reissue generates revenue, is also complicated. It makes many people anxious that record collectors have come to be the default custodians of this music.

If a record is lost to time or circumstance-78s are made from a shellac compound that is brittle and shatters easily-the performance is effectively erased. Most early recording masters were either destroyed or melted down for reuse, so the pressed and sold records became the only material evidence of these performances. Obscure records tend to survive only when there are collectors willing to seek out and preserve them. “The Anthology of American Folk Music” is probably the most significant example of how a particular collector’s preferences can guide (if not dictate) a historical canon. Each of the three sleeves was printed in a different color and featured a drawing of a celestial monochord-a single-stringed dulcimer, tuned by the hand of God-taken from “De Musica Mundana,” a book by the Elizabethan alchemist Robert Fludd, from 1618. A single LP might contain an Acadian one-step, a Delta blues, a lonesome Appalachian ballad, and a Sacred Harp hymn. Within those categories, Smith relished the juxtaposition of regional styles. He knew their relationship to folk music, their relationship to English Literature, and their relationship to the world.” Smith’s “Anthology” was derived from his personal collection, and made up of eighty-four tracks, broken into three groups: social music, ballads, and songs. In an interview with the magazine Sing Out!, from 1972, Asch said that Smith “understood the content of the records. In addition to buying records from Smith, Asch tasked him with compiling “ The Anthology of American Folk Music,” a six-LP compendium of vernacular songs recorded in the United States between 19. He never married, drank to unconsciousness, went absolutely nuts if anyone talked while he was playing a record, and, according to his friend Allen Ginsberg, kept “several years’ deposits of his semen” in the back of his freezer for “alchemical purposes.” There are stories of his thieving, particularly when he believed that an item would be better off in his care.

Like many serious collectors of arcane but precious objects, Smith could be irascible, mean, and single-minded to the point of psychopathy. “It sounded strange-and I looked for others,” he said. The first 78 Smith bought was by the Mississippi-born blues guitarist Tommy McClennan.

records, ten-inch platters introduced around the beginning of the twentieth century that contain about three minutes of music on each side. Smith collected all sorts of stuff: paper airplanes, Ukrainian Easter eggs, figures he made by looping or weaving lengths of string, anything shaped like a hamburger, and thousands, if not tens of thousands, of 78-r.p.m.

#FOLK MUSIC COLLECTOR SERIES#

“All my projects are only attempts to build up a series of objects that allow some sort of generalizations to be made,” he said, in 1968. He painted, made experimental films, practiced occult alchemy (he was ordained in the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica, a spiritual group affiliated with the magician and self-appointed prophet Aleister Crowley), and believed that the careful accumulation and ordering of things could bring about new knowledge. Smith, who was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1923, and died in 1991, was an eccentric polymath. In 1951, the record collector Harry Smith met with Moe Asch, a co-founder of Folkways Records, to see if Asch would buy all or part of his collection.

Folk music collector