The Harry Smith Project – Thoughts in Advance

Smithcover

In a lot of ways,The Celestial Monochord is a tribute to Harry Smith and the mesmerizing sampler of old recordings he edited in 1952, The Anthology of American Folk Music.

And so, this Tuesday will be an exciting day at Monochord headquarters. Four disks — two audio CDs and two DVDs — intended to pay tribute to Smith and his Anthology will be released on Tuesday (October 24). I don’t have a reviewer’s copy of the disks (unlike this putz, for example), so I’ll anticipate the release by considering what I can tell about it from the label’s advertising and what others are saying about it.

As the author of the first (and so far only) blog on the entire internet dedicated to the Anthology, my first comment is … people! Treat your bloggers a little better!

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The bulk of the disks offer audio and video from a series of tribute concerts, called The Harry Smith Project, organized in 1999 and 2001 by a guy named Hal Willner. The performers — about half of whom are big stars like Lou Reed, Wilco, Steve Earle, Elvis Costello — do what might be thought of as “covers” of the songs on Smith’s Anthology.

In exactly what sense such performances would constitute a tribute to Harry Smith is unclear to me. I can’t get it sorted out in my head.

Smith’s Anthology and the lessons it taught shaped the revivals that came after, and it defined the careers of some of the best musicians of the late 20th Century. The Anthology also became a milestone in the history of amateur musicianship in America. Those revivals, those careers, and we amateur musicians have paid tribute to Smith far beyond The Harry Smith Project‘s poor power to add or detract — the world will little note nor long remember what Sonic Youth says here …

And there are other problems. Of course, Harry Smith was a mix-master, one of history’s great juxtapositionists, so there’s no such thing as a Harry Smith cover, per se. Thinking of the Anthology‘s songs as if they were Smith’s babies only perpetuates the worship of the collector over the collected, the Lomaxes over the Leadbellies. Harry Smith himself was markedly dismissive of the Anthology and he considered his other projects, now largely forgotten, to be more important. I wonder how Smith would have felt about Tuesday’s release.

In his strange interviews, Smith treats the songs on the Anthology as mere local embodiments of some larger patterns in the human collective unconscious. Although he clearly loved them (no matter what he might have said), he portrays the records in his collection as arbitrary, as if they may as well have been any other records, or even some tangled pieces of string, or some paper airplanes discarded in the gutters of Manhattan.

To me, the most immediately obvious way to pay tribute to Harry Smith is to carry on his work — to go on collecting little bits of culture that embody the most vital meanings animating human life. To work at becoming — ourselves — the embodied examples of such meanings. To investigate and love human culture independently, idiosyncratically.

But then … what do you expect The Celestial Monochord to say?

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I knew about these Harry Smith Project concerts back when they happened, through a Tom Waits discussion list I belonged to. Although none of the list-members who attended the concerts knew or cared much about Harry Smith, their reaction to the concerts was overwhelmingly positive. Everyone seemed to agree something remarkable had happened there. And it’s no wonder. Hal Willner seems to be the right man for the job of organizing these tribute concerts.

First, he’s one of a smallish tribe of people who’ve had their lives overturned by this queer, bent little hypnotist, Harry Smith. At times, it seems there’s about as many of us in the world as there are people who’ve walked on the Moon, or who’ve been struck by lightning more than once.

Willner personally knew Smith well enough to cast him as The King in a production of The Seven Deadly Sins, staged at the Naropa Institute. It was also Hal Willner who put together Allen Ginsberg’s introduction to the catastrophically out-of-print collection of interviews with Smith, Think of the Self Speaking.

And very suggestively, Willner has used his time on Earth to collect amazing things and paste them together — giving him roughly as much insight into Smith’s mind as we can hope for. The list of Willner’s projects is dazzling, but he’s best known for gathering together very dissimilar musicians for improbable tribute albums.

He’s responsible for tributes to Thelonious Monk, Kurt Weill, Charles Mingus, pirate ballads and sea chanteys, and music from Walt Disney’s cartoons. Performers he’s rangled together for these projects include Bono, Sting, Loudon Wainwright III, Rufus Wainwright, Dr. John, John Zorn, Sun Ra, Tom Waits, Ringo Starr, Keith Richards, and Elvis Costello. Along the way, he also collaborated with Robert Altman on Short Cuts and Robert Wilson on a show in Copenhagen.

To me, the drama of listening to The Harry Smith Project will be in watching Willner do battle with the poppycocky quality of his own project. He’s in the best position anyone can be in to make a “tribute album” to Harry Smith actually pay tribute to Harry Smith. Given who he is, I don’t much doubt Willner will succeed in some sense, and on some terms. But in what sense? On what terms?

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The fourth disk of The Project‘s 4-disk set makes easier sense to me. It’s the hook that will snag me into plopping down my cash on Tuesday, although I suspect the reverse might be true for most buyers.

The fourth disk is a DVD with a documentary about the creation of the Anthology, along with selections from Smith’s abstract films, which were influential in their own right. The documentary is by Rani Singh, the director of the Harry Smith Archives and Smith’s friend and assistant in the last years of his life. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of documentarian she is, but Singh’s previous work perpetuating Smith’s memory has been inspiring and important.

This last disk — the one with the best prospects for bringing us into communion with Harry Smith himself — brings me to something called The Harry Smith Connection

Willner’s inspiration for the concert portion of this Project was, in part, two previous concerts marking the 1997 reissue of The Anthology on CD. From what I’m able to tell, the CD of those performances, The Harry Smith Connection, was widely disliked by critics. But if you judge solely by the “spin test” — how often it’s in my player, spinning — it’s one of my favorite CD’s.

Perhaps my favorite cut is “His Tapes Roll On,” which another reviewer has called “excruciating” and “unbelievably egregiously stinkerooin’ nonsense.” Unlike most of the other songs on the disk, “His Tapes Roll On” is not from the Anthology, but was written by Peter Stampfel, a Wauwautosa-born sometime member of The Fugs, whose first album was recorded by Smith. Stampfel’s creaky, amateurish, stitched-together song is about Smith’s obsession with recording sound — any, seemingly randomly chosen sound. Stampfel begins:

Harry recorded with a wire recorder
back in World War II
Harry recorded with a reel-to-reel
when the reel-to-reel was new
Harry recorded cassettes by the hundred
as the century rolled on
He even used a telephone answering machine
But Harry Smith is gone

Speed-rapping killers and jump-rope rhymes,
fireworks on the 4th of July
Complete early canon of Gregory Corso,
kittens, snowstorms, airplane trips
What is the sound of one hand clapping?
Where’s tomorrow gone?
Most of his tapes are missing in action
And Harry Smith is gone

It’s true that Stampfel’s voice and guitar-playing will never rocket to the top of the charts, but neither will anything else Harry Smith chose to record — squeaking hinges, squealing brakes, the peyote songs of the Kiowa, or the death-rattles of bowery bums.

It’s here, in Stampfel’s “egregious nonsense,” that we find the gravest contradictions and challenges in the concert recordings of The Harry Smith Project. At least on the face of it — again, sight unseen — the contradiction implied by bringing together popular, professional musicians to work up modernized, financially-viable, critic-pleasing versions of songs that (of all people) Harry Everett Smith collected … well, that contradiction seems to unravel the very goal of paying tribute to him. That’s what I’ll be listening for — the drama, inherent in the very idea of the project, of how to resolve, or respond to, or transcend The Harry Smith Project’s own contractions.

I’ll try to have something written up in the next few months.

 

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