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Before Elvis

The Anthology of American Folk Music is timeless

by Jon Garelick

Twenty years after Elvis Presley's death, the Anthology of American Folk Music has resurfaced (from Smithsonian Folkways, a six-CD box, due in stores on August 19). If Elvis's death marked the beginning of the pop audience's fragmentation -- into formats, subgenres, niche markets, tribes -- then the Anthology comes from a time that now seems almost mythic. Or perhaps it never existed -- a time when varied traditional musics had no name other than "folk," an anthropological term more than a musical one.

The original six-album Anthology was born 45 years ago, and the music it presented was ancient even then -- all from the '20 and '30s. And it was all just "folk." Compiler Harry Smith scrambled genres from track to track: hillbilly banjo and Southern fiddle music, jug band, ancient blues sacred and secular, gospel, black music and white. He divided the Anthology into three two-album sets, in categories that are now meaningless: "Ballads," "Social Music," "Songs."

Yet the Anthology singlehandedly sparked the "folk revival" of the '60s. In the scope of its influence, it was to the folk revival (and the Dylan-influenced rock that immediately succeeded it) what Lenny Kaye's Nuggets collections were to punk. Just as Nuggets gave a generation of punk and garage rockers songs to learn by the Count Five, the Sonics, and the 13th Floor Elevators, the Anthology brought Clarence Ashley, Mississippi John Hurt, and the Carter Family to '60s folkies. "We all knew every word of every song on it," recalls Dave Van Ronk, "including the ones we hated."

The Anthology was revolutionary in its time, but in the ensuing five decades it's been superseded by other collections, and the CD revolution has supplanted it many times over. Artists like Hurt, the Carters, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Sleepy John Estes, Blind Willie Johnson, Cleoma Breaux & Joseph Falcon have been collected and reissued again and again. At times they even break out of their categories -- "blues," "country," "gospel," "Cajun." And occasionally when a label digs into its catalogue, it comes up with a collection almost as quirky as Smith's. A few years back, Sony/Legacy brought together everyone from Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys to Blind Willie McTell and Barbecue Bob on its four-CD Roots N' Blues: 1925-1950. Rhino's The Sun Records Collection represented the eclectic vision of Sun's founder, Sam Phillips. So we got curiosities like Harmonica Frank Floyd, blues heavies Estes and Howlin' Wolf, R&B man Little Milton, and the rockabilly of Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, and Elvis.

Although Smith shares something of Phillips's visionary sensibility, he wasn't a label honcho. In fact, technically speaking, you'd have to call him a bootlegger. The Anthology was assembled from his personal collection of ancient 78s. In an essay that accompanies the box, Greil Marcus points out that Smith gathered discs by "such still-active labels as Columbia, Paramount, Brunswick, and Victor." The collection began around 1940, Marcus reports, with a Tommy McClennan blues record. "It sounded strange," Smith said, "so I looked for others." As warehouses were cleared for WW2 production and storage, he bought discs for next to nothing. In putting his collection together, he ignored imperatives both commercial and academic. "Smith's definition of `American folk music' would have satisfied no one else," Marcus writes. "He ignored all field recordings, Library of Congress archives, anything validated only by scholarship or carrying the must of the museum."

Instead, Smith (who died in 1991) proceeded through his own feel for folk music, his radio programmer's sense of segues, his sense of the "strange." "As 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," says Marcus. In an era of "race" records and regionalized markets (the niches before 1950), Smith blurred distinctions, never identifying singers by race, explaining Blind Lemon Jefferson's "Rabbit Foot Blues" with the simple note: "The first authentic recordings of Texas folk songs were made by this artist in the rug department of a Dallas store in 1924." And he goes on to make subtle musical observations about Lemon's guitar work and singing. The dread-and-salvation of the Reverend J.M. Gates segues into the high-spirited hocketing of the Alabama Sacred Heart Singers. There are tales of murder of suicide, love gone wrong, hymn tunes, and, as Virgil Thomson might have called them, "darn-fool ditties."

Smithsonian has reproduced Smith's original 28-page booklet, and it suggests an untreated mania. Selections are indexed and cross-referenced in mimeograph-quality typescript -- the method is crude but painstaking. Songs are summarized in all-cap headlines. So for Chubby Parker's version of "Froggy Went a-Courtin' " we get: ZOOLOGICAL MISCEGENY ACHIEVED IN MOUSE FROG NUPTIALS, RELATIVES APPROVE. Or for Clarence Ashley's "The House Carpenter": WIFE AND MOTHER FOLLOWS CARPENTER TO SEA, MOURNS BABE AS SHIP GOES DOWN. As you enter Smith's world, the notes become useful, his index identifying the selections not only by artist, title, and first lines, but by subject and even instrumentation ("Accordion, records featuring, 27, 38, 39, 68, 71 . . . Africa mentioned in notes 28, 34, 40 . . . ").

Yet the notes themselves are a bit of a ruse. Smith aspired more to mysticism than to scholarship, and his booklet is also peppered with quotes from Robert Fludd, Aleister Crowley (whom he claimed as his father), and Judge Learned Hand. The Smithsonian reissue comes weighted with even more annotation: 67 further pages of essays (including Marcus's, adapted from his recent Invisible Republic).

But Smith survives all this. Didier Hébert's "I Woke Up One Morning in May," identified by Smith as a "song of unhappy love," sounds like "On Top of Old Smokey" sung off-key in French. Clarence Ashley's "The Coo Coo Bird" makes no literal sense but persists with the unrelenting intensity of Ashley's vocal and banjo performance. In "James Alley Blues," Richard "Rabbit" Brown sings, "If you can't get along with me, it's your own fault . . . Sometimes I think you're too sweet to die, and sometimes I think you ought to be buried alive." Blind Willie Johnson wheezes powerfully, picking guitar accompaniment and trading verses with an unidentified, sweet-voiced female: "Who's that a-writing? John the Revelator. What's John a-writing? About revelations." President James Garfield's assassin sings from the gallows. Murder and salvation stand side by side. At first the discs sound like an extremely hip public-radio show of old-time music. But soon the sequencing of the songs becomes mesmerizing, hypnotic, a world unto itself, a place Marcus identifies as "Smithville."

Yes, in the banjo playing of Clarence Ashley and Buell Kazee you can hear the eerie descendants of the African banjo, the ngoni, and even consider Ashley and Kazee as modern griots, troubadours bringing the news of the community to itself. Yet as Marcus points out, these songs suggest history -- real events like the death of John Hardy -- even as they're detaching themselves from it. The historical is always transformed into the mythic. It's not the Library of Congress, it's Borges's "Library of Babel," innumerable languages and dialects of these songs collectively suggesting the infinite.

Despite all his annotation, despite the decades of scholarship that have followed him, Smith in fact erases historical context and restores the strangeness of this music. It belongs to its own world, to "Smithville," more than to specific events, or genres. It's beyond genres and before names. It's the subtext of Peter Guralnick's Searching for Robert Johnson, where you sense that part of what's drawing the author on is the ultimate unknowability of his subject. And you can relate it to any music that ever grabbed you in part because you didn't know what it was or what to call it. It might have been the first time you heard a Metropolitan Opera broadcast, not knowing the language or the story but being taken only by the sound. Or maybe it was the sound of Cajun genius Iry LeJeune attacking his accordion, singing through his nose in French and letting loose a cry. "We thought it was exciting, but what was it?", Scotty Moore recalled after recording "That's All Right" with Elvis. Or just try to remember the first time you heard a Ramones single and thought, "These guys can't play. Where can I get it?"

Jon Garelick can be reached at jgarelick[a]phx.com.