The 1952 “Anthology of American Folk Music” was the canon shot heard ’round the world. The six-LP set delivered postwar listeners a trove of riches from what the critic Greil Marcus later called the “old, weird America”—white Appalachian country, black Delta blues, Texas fiddle music, Alabama gospel and wheezy Cajun waltzes. The detailed liner notes in an accompanying handbook mixed scholarly precision with deadpan humor and strange caprice. Index entries include “Loneliness mentioned on record” as well as “Clapping, records featuring”; the occultist Aleister Crowley and the spiritualist Rudolf Steiner are cited as inspirations for the project; and many songs are tagged with headline-like summaries (“THEFT OF STETSON HAT CAUSES DEADLY DISPUTE. VICTIM IDENTIFIES SELF AS FAMILY MAN”; “WIFE’S LOGIC FAILS TO EXPLAIN STRANGE BEDFELLOW TO DRUNKARD”).
The “Anthology” fed the 1960s folk revival, and Jerry Garcia, Neil Young, Patti Smith and Elvis Costello, among others, have since drawn on it like a musical seed bank. Bob Dylan has covered 15 of its 84 tracks, including “Stackalee” by Frank Hutchison and “James Alley Blues” by Richard “Rabbit” Brown.
The collection was curated by one man, a gnome-like polymath named Harry Smith, who viewed it as a “collage,” a hybrid of document and art. With it he put a lasting stamp on the vernacular American songbook. But as John Szwed shows in his highly enjoyable biography, “Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith,” the “Anthology” was only one facet of a varied career devoted to synthesis and connection.
Smith thought of himself mainly as a painter, though most of his visual art, including influential animated and abstract films, has disappeared. Irascible, alcoholic and allergic to paying rent, he would rip up his work in anger, toss it aside once completed, lose it to eviction or cannibalize it for further projects, ever heedless of his legacy. He was “completely committed to art,” one friend recalled, “little interest in the outcome of his work”—only the “doing of it.”
Unlike his fellow music-gatherer Alan Lomax, who made field recordings, Smith compiled his anthology from commercial records—his own vast collection of 78s that had been put out by regional labels in the 1920s and ’30s. But his work, like that of the ethnomusicologist Lomax, was rooted in ethnography. Smith had a compulsive urge to document that dated to childhood and “would always identify himself as an anthropologist,” writes Mr. Szwed, a professor emeritus at Yale as well as an accomplished biographer.