Harry Smith Anthology – Page 2 – The Celestial Monochord

Moonshiner’s Parking Lot?

A piece of St. Paul's cultural history may be torn down for a parking lot.

The Victoria Cafe produced a recording of absolutely unique importance

—

In May 2006, I realized that an internationally notorious recording from 1927 — "Moonshiner's Dance, Part One" — was the work of the house band of a nightclub at 825 University Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Nobody had understood this before, so I was astonished and overjoyed to find the building still standing 79 years later. Since then — since early 2006 — I drive by it often, and each time my heart skips a beat until I see that the Victoria Theater is still there.

But now, not even 4 years into my research for a book on "Moonshiner's Dance," the Victoria building is being eyed for demolition to make way for a parking lot.

What disturbs me most is that, while my findings are enormously suggestive, the building's historical importance is not yet well understood. Like a species allowed to go extinct before biologists are even able to describe it, the Victoria Theater may be destroyed in the near-total absence of knowledge.

Other community members have great reasons to want the building saved.

I have my own reasons.

[ NOTE: Most of the information previously presented in this space has been superseded by my subsequent writing and research efforts. For this reason, I've deleted the text. Please visit this more recent post for better information on my mission to express the many stories I've encountered while trying to understand the meanings of this place. ]

Original play brings Anthology’s mindscape to life in Madison, Wisconsin: “Minglewood Blues”

A play reflects the mythic American fever dream that haunts so many Anthology listeners

If you expect to be in Wisconsin in the next few weekends — or can arrange to be — I urge you to see Minglewood Blues at the Broom Street Theater in Madison. Inspired by The Anthology of American Folk Music, this new play must be among the most amusing, heartfelt, and original responses to that influential document in quite a few years.

In the flesh-and-blood medium of the stage, Broom Street has made manifest the strange pleasures and confusing revelations most people go through after discovering this collection of early 20th
century recordings.

The play should interest anyone with a passing acquaintance with a few of the old American legends — maybe Casey Jones, or John Henry, or Stagger Lee, or the froggie who went a-courtin’ a mouse. But the play’s depth and wit do “telescope” with audience knowledge, and it really excels as an introduction to the Anthology‘s strange mindset, and as a sort of luxury spa for Anthology veterans.

In Minglewood Blues, the events, images, and characters scattered throughout the Anthology rise up in Broom Street’s humble little space and take over the joint, much as they do in our minds — with birds and trains and mountains and murderers vying for our confused attention, exchanging gunfire and one-liners, exposing one another’s crimes and pleading one another’s case.

Becoming Anthology-obsessed makes you dizzy like that. Playwright Doug Reed has taken that dizziness seriously as part of the Anthology’s aesthetic and made it the basis of his play.

In bouncing motifs off one another and splicing narratives together, the script performs one illuminating stunt after another, proposing dozens of fascinating possibilities.

Why moles are blind is explained, as is the nature of lawyers. The deep geology and the whole ecosystem of a place called Minglewood are made to mingle with Scandinavian immigrants and Southern labor history. The sheer body count makes the play a kind of Hamlet-meets-Wisconsin Death Trip.

There are so many new angles to see, in fact, that a law of diminishing returns eventually sets in (even if rather later than you might imagine). Once Minglewood Blues blows your mind many times, and then many more, and then some more, your mind is neatly blown.

Some moderate editing would be welcome in the second half — perhaps Frankie and Albert’s wedding could be deleted, or some bits about Alan Catcher’s business dealings. I would hate to miss the rebellion of Free Labor, but the resulting sharper focus on John Henry’s regrets might be worth it.

A death-row scene between Alice Frye and Frankie, intended to be a culmination and summation, tries to accomplish too much on too many levels. I wanted to see these two actors switch roles, but it’s unlikely the acting and directing are at fault for not quite carrying the weight loaded into the scene.

Incidentally, Harry Smith’s Anthology was history’s first great case of “color-blind casting” and I would have been interested to see this somehow integrated into Minglewood Blues. As things actually played out (perhaps out of practical necessity), I sometimes wondered if Broom Street hadn’t actually worked against the
progressive intent of Smith’s treatment of race, which remains ahead of its time to this day.

I was impressed with the quality of the actors, musicians,
direction, and production standards at this humble venue. And any rough edges left on this particular material only served to magnify its meaning and emotional impact. I’d hate to see them sanded off in subsequent stagings.

The actors and operators of the Broom Street Theater are unpaid volunteers — the hat is passed for the cast before the show. Still, ever since its birth in the cultural ferment of 1968, the theater has been a very small animal with big artistic ambitions.

As a result, an especially deep and moving kind of sense gets made when this particular group takes on Harry Smith’s Anthology, which achieved very high art through a collage of folk art.

And they’ve gone to extraordinary lengths to do it. As a keepsake for the audience, the playwright himself has lovingly designed the program for this production by hand, borrowing elements of Smith’s original hand-made liner notes.

The theater has sacrificed perhaps a third of its already-scarce audience space to make way for a bandstand. Its musicians competently play autoharp, clawhammer-style banjo, fiddle, accordion, jew’s harp, harmonica, two guitars, and jug.

Very appropriately, this music is intimately involved, top to bottom, in the play’s action and themes — not only punctuating and bridging scenes, but deeply involving itself in the action and meaning of the story.

In fact, the band is composed largely of cast members, and vise versa. Its fiddler grows wings and accompanies a character to heaven. After a young boy is lured to his death in a flower garden, he gets up and straps on the accordion. And Satan, it turns out, plays a mean harmonica.

The Anthology and Carbine Williams

Jimmy Stewart movie reminds us what was at stake in the post-WWII folk revival

OK, I’m officially a Turner Classic Movies fan.

Lately, movies hardly seem worth watching if Robert Osborne isn’t there, just before and after, to give a cheery commentary about them. Bruno could be OK, but I’ll wait until it comes to TCM so Osborne can tell me who ALMOST played Bruno before they finally cast Sacha Baron Cohen.

More seriously, the relentless march of old films has mattered to my development as a cultural historian. I live much of my life in a pre-WWII “immersion program” of my own design, and it helps that movies carry a lot of dense and very palatable cultural information.

Consider the relatively obscure Jimmy Stewart movie Carbine Williams — a biopic about an inventor who helped create the M1 carbine rifle, a standard gun used in WWII.

Aside from this seemingly unpromising subject, TCM’s viewer guide said that Williams was a bootlegger in the 1920’s and created his invention while in a North Carolina prison. I figured hillbilly stringband music had to appear somewhere, right?

Also, the movie was released in 1952, the same year Folkways Records released Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. Maybe the movie would shed light on … say, the prevailing attitudes about southern Appalachian culture that greeted The Anthology upon its release.

I hunkered down to watch TCM’s broadcast. What blew my mind turned out to be the way the filmmakers tried to compensate for the dry subject matter — how they tried to draw you into the biography.

The film begins “now” — in 1952 — with the son of Carbine Williams having had schoolyard fights about his father’s criminal past. The son is otherwise a typical 8-year-old of 1952, with the greasy kid stuff in his hair, the rolled-up jeans, the horizontal-striped t-shirt.

To help the son understand him, Carbine Williams brings the boy to his old prison warden, who tells the boy — and us — the remarkable story of how a convict in his prison went on to win WWII for America.

In the end, the boy now understands and appreciates his father’s experiences as a Prohibition outlaw, a convict in the Depression, and finally an engineer of the military-industrial complex that won the war. A heart-warming hug closes the film.

The appeal of the framing storyline is direct: the events of the first half of the century will be incomprehensible, or at least misunderstood, by the baby-boom generation. The movie proposes and fulfills a dream that the catastrophic experiences of two World Wars and the Depression (if not the fiasco of Prohibition) could somehow be appreciated and acknowledged by the children of The New Prosperity.

That this yawning divide in experience could somehow be bridged someday was, and is, an entertaining fantasy.

•

About the musicians whose 1920’s recordings were reissued in 1952 on The Anthology, Greil Marcus wrote:

In 1952 [they] were only twenty or twenty-five years out of their time; cut off by the cataclysms of the Great Depression and the Second World War and by a national narrative that never included their kind, they appeared now like visitors from another world, like passengers on a ship that had drifted into the sea of the unwritten. “All those guys on that Harry Smith Anthology were dead,” Cambridge folkies Eric von Schmidt and Jim Rooney wrote in 1979, recalling how it seemed in the early 1960’s, when most of Smith’s avatars were very much alive. “Had to be.”

The Anthology derived some of its power from exploiting the same radical break in memory that Carbine Williams uses as a dramatic frame. To young people the age of the Williams boy — that is, Bob Dylan’s or Joan Baez’s age — the world that created their parents and the recordings on The Anthology alike seemed about as distant in time and place as any world could.

•

At some level, the cataclysms of the first half of the century were not only events Carbine Williams witnessed, they were projects he undertook. As a suggested path for the boy himself to follow, his father’s life could reasonably be seen as a nightmarish sentence.

Carbine Williams never hints at the possibility that the son might be less interested in the life his father had lived than in the world his father had created and would leave as the boy’s inheritance. And in 1952, that world looked like an awfully mixed bag.

A lot baby boomers came to see the entertainment industry that produced Carbine Williams — the one that failed to anticipate their perspective — as a purveyor of bad dreams thin enough to be transparent. They were drawn to cultural alternatives that were more opaque and thus less easily churned out by the efficient new systems for the manufacture and distribution of culture.

The most committed Folk Revivalists of the early 1960’s traded their father’s M1 carbine rifle for their grandfather’s banjo. Staging a kind of identity insurrection, kids like the Williams boy would try on identities that their fathers seemed to have abandoned to become architects of the Cold War — identities inspired by Woody Guthrie, Charlie Poole, Jessie James, or Henry Lee’s jilted lover.

Or Harry Smith — whoever he was. His Anthology was like a Ouija board for receiving and sending messages from and to the millions of souls Carbine Williams and his invention had left for dead.

Some of the Williams boy’s generation tried to reenact the Anthology‘s obsolete performances. Some tried to retrace the occult thinking that organized the collection. Many tried to discern, in the most obsolete songs they could find, the stories their fathers either didn’t know or had decided not to pass along.

Patty Hearst’s famous rifle was an M1 carbine.

Alchemist Transforms Breslin into Ace

One of the hotels that once evicted Harry Smith becomes a boutique attraction.

Avid fans of Harry Smith will recognize the name of the Hotel Breslin. For one thing, it was one of the many roach motels he called home until he was thrown out for lack of payment.

Allen Ginsberg reported:

Then Harry went into a funny kind of amphetamine tailspin. He got really paranoid and got moved out of the Chelsea, I think, or expelled or something. He couldn’t pay his rent, and wound up in a series of other hotels, including the Breslin Hotel, by 1984. But he wouldn’t talk to anybody, wouldn’t talk to me, maybe because I didn’t supply him with money, because I was broke at the time.

I didn’t see Harry for a long while and began visiting him again at the Breslin Hotel, on 28th Street and Broadway. Same problem, still wanting money …

In that room at the Breslin, the whole room was taken up with shelves of books and records, then a movie editing table, and a tiny bed. I have some photographs of that, of him pouring milk, The Alchemist Transforming Milk into Milk.

In that bathroom he had a little birdie that he fed and talked to, and let out of his cage all the time. When his little birds died, he put their bodies in the freezer. He’d keep them for various alchemical purposes, along with a bottle, which he said was several years’ deposits of his semen, which he was also using for whatever magic structures.

[ introduction to Think of the self Speaking, pages 7-8 ]

His evictions from such places must have been difficult for Smith, of course, but they’re also an on-going tragedy for all of us.

They often resulted in catastrophic losses of Harry’s original artwork, as well as his inspired collections of objects of substantially more lasting value today, presumably, than whatever he kept in that freezer. All the world is impoverished by Harry’s housing problems.

In a sad irony, Harry’s chronic homelessness also had a small upside. As I understand it, he sometimes sold his stuff to keep a roof over his head a little while longer — typically to buyers who preserved it better than Smith could have or would have, given that he sometimes intentionally destroyed is own artwork.

He first approached Moses Asch of Folkways Records to try and pawn his 78 collection. Asch had the idea of instead paying Smith to edit the Anthology of American Folk Music, using Smith’s own collection as its basis.

Smith later sold that 78 collection to the New York Public Library, where Mike Seeger and Ralph Rinzler were allowed to copy the whole thing in exchange for cataloging it. Those bootlegs were a wellspring for the repertoire of the New Lost City Ramblers, one of the most influential bands in history.

Anyway, point is, the Hotel Breslin is now being opened as the “gleaming new super-hip Ace Hotel,” according to the Observer. If you have enough money, you can stay where Harry couldn’t.

My wife and I love to stay in old renovated hotels — most recently, the Palmer House in Chicago and the Biltmore in Los Angeles — in part because it’s possible to get some surprisingly good prices in some of these amazing places at the moment.

Therefore, I can’t hold my snout too high about the Breslin/Ace project. I would like to stay there.

But if you have heretofore missed the ironies that gentrification sometimes presents, the Breslin/Ace project is a good place to get up to speed.

The hotel management is hoping to incorporate some of Smith’s artwork into the interior design. They also hope to offer his pioneering abstract animated films on the hotel’s pay-per-view TV system.

Some rooms feature turntables and selected vinyl, and the management hopes to get permission to press new vinyl copies of The Anthology for the enjoyment of guests.

( This raises an intriguing question I’ve been wondering about too. Could Smithsonian/Folkways re-issue The Anthology on vinyl to the general public?

Vinyl is back, at least among a certain segment, and I think it’s probably the same segment that would love to own The Anthology on LP.

For the 1997 CD reissue of The Anthology, Smithsonian/Folkways worked hard to approximate, as much as possible, the experience of encountering The Anthology in its original form. Well, what better way to approximate it than to actually, in fact, reissue The Anthology in its original form? Eh? Hello? )

The Breslin/Ace Hotel project has been controversial, in part because there are many “legacy” residents in the building, until recently a rent-controlled apartment building.

Some residents haven’t appreciated the hassles of living in a construction zone, and some presumably just don’t like hipsters, tourists, rich people, and whatnot. There’s a little uncertainty over just how well residents and guests will mix in the building.

The same investors also recently renovated the Chelsea, where Harry Smith died on November 27, 1991.

Disk Sift Yields Smith-Newsie Link

(newsboy, 1921, Library of Congress photo)

I was wading through the Archeophone catalog yesterday, planning my next purchase.

… It's an incredible record label. Everything I've gotten from them has been a hoot to listen to, and has revolutionized my perceptions and tastes …

And I finally noticed their series of reissues of "Hit of The Week" records. As the Archeophone website describes them,

They sold on newsstands during the Great Depression for 15 cents and quickly
became the best-selling records of the early 1930s: the laminated flexible
cardboard records known as "Hit of the Week." Featuring the top songs of the
day, performed by some of the most noted jazz and dance musicians (often under
pseudonyms), Hit of the Week records provided just that — one hit, once a week — to
an American public with hardly a dime to spare but hungry for great music by
great artists.

As always, it seems, I thought of Harry Smith and the Anthology.

Back in July, I first realized that phonograph records were once distributed on city streets at newsstands and by newsboys.

Those tough, tragic little kids in short pants and floppy caps hollering "Extra! Extra!" sometimes sold 78's along with newspapers.

As William
Howland Kenney wrote in his brilliant Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History, 1904-1930:

… the newsboys of the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Defender
regularly carried copies of the latest records of the week along with
their newspapers. They sold the disks at $1 apiece; for many customers
the records were as important as the news.

Something now made real sense for the first time. The funny, fake headlines Harry Smith wrote for his liner notes to volume one of the Anthology of American Folk Music may have been based on actual experience.

Newsboys might really, in fact, have yelled something very much like "Georgie runs into rock after mother's warning! Dies with the engine he loves!"

Interestingly, two of the performers on Archeophone's "Hit of the Week" CDs — Vincent Lopez and Rudy Vallee — have loose connections to The Victoria Cafe.

Therefore, I might have to buy these … although, times being what they are, I may have to wait until this music is finally released on cheap pieces of Durium.

The Old French Weird America

Someone has started an amazing blog about Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. If he keeps going along these lines, it will end up being one of the most important things to happen to the Anthology since its reissue on CD in 1997.

Apparently the work of an obsessive French collector, The Old Weird America (TOWA) is posting at least one entry on each Anthology cut, with large zip files containing wonderful batches of mp3s. These mp3s are other recordings by each Anthology artist, as well as other “covers” of the same song.

TOWA also provides a little writing of his own about the Anthology artists, although that text is often the standard, sturdy, reliable consensus view of the subject. Very nice, but not usually new. The real eye-popping, one-of-a-kind value of this blog is the audio files.

Really, the project comes off a lot like the interactive, online version of the Anthology-with-notes that I dreamed of at the end of this post back in July — except for its, let’s say, “independent” attitude toward copyright law.

Two thoughts:

Of course, I’m dying to see what TOWA does with “Moonshiners Dance” … and whether he bothers to contact me to see what I have up my sleeve. He is not good about citing his sources of information or audio, so I don’t know if he swings that way.

Also, I’ve always wondered what I’d do after my Diamonds in the Rough series is finished. I guess I’ve dragged my feet about writing that last entry because I have no substitute for the series.

One idea has been to write one piece on each of the 84 entries in the Anthology. At my usual pace, the project would take nearly a decade.

Well, in a way, TOWA has beaten me to it.

Certainly, his contribution is these amazing audio collections he’s posting, whereas I would do my usual Carl Sagan meets Robert Cantwell routine.

I would really have new things to say about these cuts … long, dense, ponderous, new things to say …

A Geography of the Anthology

Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music as a Google Map
by The Celestial Monochord

For two and a half years, I've tried to explain to people why I'm dedicating so much time, energy, and earnings to researching "Moonshiners Dance," recorded in Minnesota by Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra in 1927.

It's impossible to express in a few words.

Usually, I've waved my hands in the air, describing a hypothetical Google Map showing the geographical origin of each cut on Harry Smith's 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music.

On such a map, "Moonshiners Dance" would stand out like a sore thumb, completely alone as the only selection from anywhere near "us" — me and the person I'm boring. In the past week, I asked myself, seriously, why does it have to be hypothetical?

And so, Google Maps and I present A Geography of the Anthology.

The Methodology of a Geography of the Anthology

In creating the map, I used the 1997 Anthology liner notes and some Wikipedia to choose a location that most shaped each Anthology selection. This was not easy, especially limiting myself to one "pin" per recording.

But I gave it a shot and didn't much fret about it.

For example, Henry Thomas' work is a profound contribution exactly because it's so richly about being unstuck from any particular place — it's all about the road. I put him in his home town in the state of Texas.

Many of the Memphis performers were from other communities in the same region, but it matters that the Memphis Jug Band is from Memphis, regardless of where its members were born. So there they are on Beale Street.

I've made an attempt to be accurate but not precise. Look very closely at Memphis. Nine Anthology selections belong in Memphis, in all fairness. I've stuck my pins every block or two all the way down Beale Street, even though I don't really know where in Memphis these people did their thing.

Sometimes, it was tempting to emphasize the isolation of "Moonshiners Dance" by skooching my decisions southward.

The leader of the Cincinnati Jug Band, according to the 1997 liner notes, "was apparently from around the Alabama-Georgia state border." But it would've been too absurd to follow such vague instructions just to keep the Cincinnati Jug Band out of Cincinnati.

The two selections by Chicago church congregations complicated my visual argument. Those congregations and their recordings are products of the "great migration" of African Americans from the South to the great industrial cities of the North. In a sense, they illustrate how far north the southern culture represented in the Anthology managed to flow.

I could have placed those congregations in the southern states where their leaders were born, but that would have been so wrong on too many levels. For one, the music came out of a very distinctly Chicago experience. I decided to trust the viewer to understand what those pins represent.

Ken Maynard was probably the hardest to place.

He was raised somewhere in Indiana, but "claimed Texas as his home," according to the liner notes. He traveled around as a rodeo and circus performer, worked as a real cowboy, and went to Hollywood in 1923, where he was billed as "the American Boy's Favorite Cowboy." His photo makes him look like a little Midwestern kid playing dress-up.

So where do you put Ken Maynard? A random spot in Indiana? A random spot in Texas or in "The West"? In Hollywood? I decided that his song describes an image of the West in the mind of somebody who was from somewhere else. I placed him as an Indiana boy dreaming of cowboys and Indians. Maybe you have another idea.

The Anthology as Tarot Deck

(a modern Tarot deck by John Coulthart)

Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music is so well established as a canonical text that you’d think Smith must’ve had tenure somewhere like Harvard … he didn’t. And it’s easy to miss how perverse an idea the Anthology originally was.

As Greil Marcus wrote in the book that launched a thousand ships, Invisible Republic:

… the Anthology was disguised as a textbook; it was an occult document disguised as an academic treatise … This was in Harry Smith’s grain. A polymath and an autodidact, a dope fiend and an alcoholic, a legendary experimental filmmaker and a more legendary sponger, he was perhaps most notorious as a fabulist. He liked to brag about killing people.

For generations before him, Smith’s family was deeply involved in the more marginalized traditions of American mysticism — the Knights Templar, the Freemasons, the Theosophists. Smith often claimed to be Aleister Crowley’s illegitimate son.

Smith brought this sensibility to the design for the Anthology, which comes across as having been ordered by some unknowable, arcane, lost cosmological system. His liner notes include the following quote meant to help the reader understand his decisions:

“In Elementary Music The Relation Of Earth To The Sphere of Water is 4 to 3, As There Are In The Earth Four Quarters of Frigidity to Three of Water.” — Robert Fludd

All of this matters desperately, for reasons I’ll mention in my series of posts on the first seven seconds of entry #41 of the Anthology, “Moonshiners Dance Part One.”

For now, I’m just pointing out that someone named Zac Johnson has invented a way of using the Anthology for something resembling a Tarot reading. Harry becomes your oracle.

You
use an ordinary deck of playing cards to generate a random number from 1 to 84, which
gives you an entry number for a cut on the Anthology, according to
Harry’s mysterious and iconic numbering system.

You then go to that corresponding song, and
use it as a basis for an interpretive reading. The extremely evocative recordings on the Anthology should serve as an endlessly rich source for readings by any reasonably sharp fortune teller who knows the collection. The Anthology for fun and prophet.

I think Harry would have loved
this. And then hated it. And then failed to understand it. And then forgotten about it. And then hated
it. And then dismissed it as
uninteresting. And then hated it. And then loved it …

Here’s a blog entry and podcast that explain the details of the card system.

Fake Headlines Mesmerize Music Geeks

When you first read the fake newspaper headlines in Harry Smith’s liner notes for Volume One of his Anthology of American Folk Music, you’re forced to stop what you’re doing, sit down, and read them all very closely.

Harry knew what he was doing.

Those headlines are great devices of seduction — or a fishhook through the mouth. In turn, his liner notes, as a whole, have helped make his 1952 collection of 1920’s records one of the most influential documents in American music.

This morning, for the first time, I read something that finally made real sense of these queer little jokey headlines. It was in William Howland Kenney’s description of the various ways record companies got records into the hands of consumers in the 1920’s:

… the newsboys of the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Defender regularly carried copies of the latest records of the week along with their newspapers. They sold the disks at $1 apiece; for many customers the records were as important as the news. As one newsboy recalled: “You’d go to one customer and she’d get all excited over a new blues and start telling you all about her girl friend or some relative who was sure to buy one, too.”
— Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History, 1904-1930, p 123

It’s perfectly sensible, then, to suppose that a corner newsboy might literally have shouted something like “Extra! Extra! Mamie Smith’s man don’t treat her right! Has Crazy Blues!”

If so, the newsboys and Harry Everett Smith shared the same technique for drawing attention to the records, as does the Anthology itself to this very day.

Whether Harry understood this, I don’t know — but it would be worth looking into. He was born in 1923 in Washington state and grew up mostly in Bellingham, where I doubt corner newsboys were a common sight. This sales method appears to have been little-known among researchers until it was described by William Howland Kenney in his (mind-blowing) 1993 book. Harry Smith died in 1991.

Smith’s headlines have been posted by someone named Joshua, at someplace called “Dinner on the Molly.” He also helpfully includes links to the songs
at YouTube.

It would be great if, someday, a really well-made interactive replica of the Anthology, closely based on Harry’s liner notes, were legally available online. Joshua’s blog entry and the YouTube piracy are evocative how this might work.

See also my entry about the availability of the liner notes from Smithsonian.

Harry Smith’s Liner Notes Available for Download

The first time I went to a racetrack —
Canterbury Downs in Chaska, Minnesota around 1999 —
I picked up the horse-racing program and felt a jolt.

“So THIS is where Harry Smith got the design of his liner notes to The Anthology of American Folk Music!”

Wherever he got his ideas for them, those liner notes were so weird —
so peculiar and particular and captivating —
that listening to The Anthology without getting to know its liner notes seems a little perverse.

From the beginning, those liner notes have massively multiplied the force of the blast that’s slowly gone off in American culture thanks to Harry Smith’s Anthology —
a 1952 collection of old recordings from the late 1920’s and early 1930’s.

Well, now the Smithsonian has put those notes online for download by anybody for free. Maybe this is just the first time I’ve noticed it, I’m not sure.

In any case, it’s a big honking 62 MB PDF, so watch out. Also note that they start with the new liner notes from the 1997 reissue before getting on to Harry’s original notes.

The posting of this PDF seems to be part of a site redesign, eliminating the Smithsonian’s old Anthology site and replacing it with a new one that looks rather like their Global Sound commerce site.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this change means that the individual entries of the Anthology will soon be available for purchase as mp3’s.

Of course, I think it’s time to stop chippying around and kidding yourself and get the box set on CD. You’ll never regret the expense, believe me.