Harry Everett Smith (May 29, 1923 – November 27, 1991) was an American polymath, who was credited variously as an artist, experimental filmmaker, bohemian, mystic, record collector, hoarder, student of anthropology and Neo-Gnostic bishop.
Smith was an important figure in the Beat Generation scene in New York City, and his activities, such as his use of mind-altering substances and interest in esoteric spirituality, anticipated aspects of the Hippie movement. Besides his films, such as his full length cutout animated film Heaven and Earth Magic (1962), Smith is also remembered for his influential Anthology of American Folk Music, drawn from his extensive collection of out-of-print commercial 78 rpm recordings.
Throughout his life Smith was an inveterate collector. Other than records, his collections included string figures,A brochure accompanying an exhibit of Harry Smith's string figures stated that, "[f]irst described in Western anthropological literature by Franz Boas in 1888, these patterns – made by looping or weaving lengths of string into geometric forms or shapes that often evoke familiar objects – have been produced throughout history, both as a secular pastime and as a spiritual practice. When he died, Smith left an unfinished thousand-page manuscript on string figures, along with an extensive collection of figures that he had created", "Harry Smith: String Figures", Cabinet Gallery, Brooklyn, N.Y. (September 19 through November 3, 2012) paper airplanes, Seminole textiles, and Ukrainian Easter eggs.
Biography Harry Smith was born in Portland, Oregon, and spent his earliest years in Washington state in the area between Seattle and Bellingham. As a child, he lived for a time with his family in Anacortes, Washington, a town on Fidalgo Island, where the Swinomish Indian reservation is located.Ed Sanders, biographical essay in Liner Notes to Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, Volume 4, Revenant RVM 211 (2000), pp. 4–5. He attended high school in nearby Bellingham.
Smith's parents were Theosophists with Pantheistic tendencies (involving the belief in an immanent God who is identical with the universe or nature), and both were fond of folk music. His mother, Mary Louise, originally from Sioux City, Iowa, came from a long line of school teachers and herself taught for a time on the Lummi Indian reservation near Bellingham. His father, Robert James Smith, a fisherman, worked as a watchman for the Pacific American Fishery, a salmon canning company. Smith's paternal great-grandfather, John Corson Smith (d. 1910), had been a Union colonel in the American Civil War, brevetted brigadier general just as the war ended, and had served from 1885 to 1889 as lieutenant governor of the state of Illinois. He had also been a prominent Freemason and authored several books about the history of the order."Meet the Generals: John Corson Smith", Galena [Illinois] History (December, 2011).
Smith's parents, who did not get along, lived in separate houses, meeting only at dinner time. Although poor, they gave their son an artistic education, including 10 years of drawing and painting lessons. For a time, it is said, they ran an art school in their house. Smith was a voracious reader and he recalled his father bringing him a copy of Carl Sandburg's folksong anthology, American Songbag. "We were considered some kind of 'low' family", Smith once said, "despite my mother's feeling that she was [an incarnation of] the Czarina of Russia".Ed Sanders, Liner Notes (2000), pp. 4–5. Friends recall that in high school Smith carried around a camera, and in his high school yearbook said that he wanted to compose symphonic music.
Physically, Smith was undersized and had a curvature of the spine which kept him from being drafted (a circumstance that later would disqualify him from benefitting from the G.I. Bill). During World War II, he took a job as a mechanic working nights on the construction of the tight, hard-to-reach interior of Boeing bomber planes, for which his short stature suited him.John Cohen wrote: "Moe [Asch] first told me about Harry Smith, the man: that Smith was a little oddball guy – something of a hunchback – who had amassed his collection of 78 rpm records on the West Coast, and paid for it with his job working in the tight parts of World War II bombers." John Cohen in Liner Notes to Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, Volume 4, Revenant RVM 211 (2000), pp. 32–33. Smith used the money he made from his job to buy blues records. The money also enabled him to study anthropology at the University of Washington in Seattle for five semesters between 1942 and the fall of 1944. He focused on American Indian tribes concentrated in the Pacific Northwest, making numerous field trips to document the music and customs of the Lummi, whom he had gotten to know through his mother's work with them.Sanders, Liner Notes (2000) pp. 8–9.
When the war ended Smith, now 22, moved to the Bay Area of San Francisco, then home to a lively bohemian folk music and jazz scene. As a collector of blues records, he had already been corresponding with the noted blues record aficionado James McKune. He now also began seriously collecting old hillbilly music records from junk dealers and stores which were going out of business and even appeared as a guest on a folk music radio show hosted by poet Jack Spicer.Sanders, Liner Notes (2000), p. 9. In 1948, his mother succumbed to cancer.Sanders, Liner Notes (2000), p. 14. Immediately after her funeral, Smith, who was estranged from his father, left Berkeley for a room above a well known after-hours jazz club in the Fillmore district of San Francisco. Smith was especially drawn to bebop, a new jazz form which had originated during impromptu jam sessions before and after paid performances; and San Francisco abounded in night spots and after hours clubs where Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker could be heard. At this time he painted several ambitious jazz-inspired abstract paintings (since destroyed) and began making animated avant garde films featuring patterns that he painted directly on the film stock and which were intended to be shown to the accompaniment of bebop music.Sanders, Liner Notes (2000), p. 10.
In 1950, Smith received a Guggenheim grant to complete an abstract film. This enabled him first to visit and later move to New York City.Biography of Harry Smith on Harry Smith Archives website . He arranged for his collections, including his records, to be shipped to the East Coast. He said that "one reason he moved to New York was to study the Cabala". And, 'I wanted to hear Thelonious Monk play'."quoted in Sanders, Liner Notes (2000), p. 11. When his grant money ran out, he brought what he termed "the cream of the crop" of his record collection to Moe Asch, president of Folkways Records, with the idea of selling it. Instead, Asch proposed that the 27-year-old Smith use the material to edit a multi-volume anthology of American folk music in long playing format – then a newly developed, cutting edge medium – and he provided space and equipment in his office for Smith to work in. The recording engineer on the project was Péter Bartók, son of the renowned composer and folklorist.
In this period and through the early 1960s, Smith became close to Lionel Ziprin, becoming a frequent houseguest. Ziprin supplied Smith with peyote, and introduced Smith to his Kabalist grandfather, Naftali Tzvi Margolies. Smith recorded many hours of audio with Margolies over a two-year period.
Anthologist of American folk music
The resultant Folkways anthology, issued in August 1952 under the title Anthology of American Folk Music, was a compilation of recordings of folk music issued on hillbilly and race records that had been released commercially on 78 rpm. These dated from the abbreviated dawn, sometimes called the "golden age",John Cohen, Liner Notes to Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, Volume 4 RVN 211 (2000) p. 40. of the commercial country music industry, that is, between 1927, when, as Smith explained, "acoustic recording Technically, they were "electric recordings", "acoustic recordings" were made by someone singing into a large trumpet, a practice that ended c. 1925. made possible accurate music reproduction, and 1932, when the Depression halted folk music sales",Harry Smith, "Foreword," to liner notes American Folk Music, Folkways Records (1952). and the artists, in many cases, sank into obscurity. Originally issued as budget discs marketed to regional, rural audiences, these records had long been known, collected, and occasionally reissued by folkloristsFor example, Ronald D. Cohen writes, "John Lomax produced the [78 rpm] compilation album Smoky Mountain Ballads for RCA in 1941 [Victor P 79]. It included ten commercial recordings by Uncle Dave Macon, the Carter Family, Gil Tanner and his Skillet Lickers, Bill Monroe, and others [such as J. E. Mainer]. Alan would produce two similar compilations for Brunswick in 1947, Mountain Frolic and Listen to Our Story," Ronald D. Cohen, editor, Alan Lomax Assistant in Charge: The Library of Congress Letters, 1935-1945 (University of Mississippi Press, 2011) p. 390. and aficionados,"Hillbilly reissues were learned and performed by revival performers such as Pete Seeger, who credited his sources and suggested that people should copy them, not him", Neil V. Rosenberg, Bluegrass: A History (University of Illinois Press, 2005), p. 172. but this was the first time such a large compilation was made available to affluent, non-specialist urban dwellers. A scholar later commented that Smith was "not down in Appalachia with a tape recorder," as collectors in the 1930s had been, and he "wasn't interested in pure tradition, like there was a source." Instead, he continued, Smith was interested in "commercial recordings that were already packagings of music that he could organize."
LP discs could hold much more material than three-minute 78s, and had greater fidelity and far less surface noise. The Anthology was packaged as a set of three boxed albums with a total of 6 LPs. The front of each box a different color: red, blue, and green – in Smith's schema, representing the alchemical elements. Priced at $25.00 per two-disc set, they were relatively expensive. For those with little money, Moe Asch maintained a retail record store in the 1950s near Union Square Park where he sold all 6 of the Anthology records for $1 each, as well as others from his catalogue. The $1 records were sold without their original jackets and with a hole punched through the label area to indicate that the record was remaindered and not to be sold for the full retail price. A fourth album, comprising topical songs from the Depression era, was originally planned by Asch and his long-time assistant, Marian Distler, and never completed by Smith. It was issued in 2000, nine years after his death, in CD format by Revenant Records with a 95-page booklet of tribute essays to Smith.Smith told Cohen that there were to be "four of them in the series." "Red, Blue, Green [symbolizing Fire, Air and Water] were issued, so that the element that was left out was Earth. The type of thinking that I applied to records, I still apply to other things like Seminole patchwork, or to Ukrainian Easter eggs" (Chelsea Hotel Interview, Sing Out! 4/5: 2–6 , excerpted in Liner Notes to Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, Volume 4, Revenant RVM 211 , p. 33). In another interview, he said he had quarreled with Miss Distler over the song selection for the fourth volume (Interview conducted by Gary Kenton at the Breslin Hotel, NYC , quoted in Liner Notes to Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, Volume 4, Revenant RVM 211 , p. 42).