Harry Smith

Do As Thy Wilt

Legend has it that when Harry Everett Smith turned twelve, his father gave him a complete set of blacksmith's tools. "Now you can extract gold from lead," he told him. And the son did just that. Or at least, he tried to do something very much like it.

After all, what is Harry Smith's "Anthology Of American Folk Music" if not an alchemical artifact, a quest for the philosopher's stone? An essential guide to the roots of American folk music, certainly, but at the same time an initiatory treatise on musical cosmology.

Then again, the Smith family tree doesn't lie: a grandfather affiliated with Freemasonry, parents devoted to theosophy and esotericism. "Once, in our attic, I found all these documents illustrated with hands that had eyes, various Masonic documents belonging to my grandfather. My father said I shouldn't have seen them and burned them without hesitation. That's the origin of my interest in metaphysics."

Ethnomusicologist, filmmaker, painter, mystic, compulsive collector: a hundred years after his birth, the eclectic (and eccentric) figure of Harry Smith remains as indecipherable as ever. For Rani Singh, longtime director of the Harry Smith Archives, "we can never fully separate the truth from the myth, but we can be certain that from childhood he had been instilled with a reverence for nature and an alchemical synthesis of the arts and sciences that culminated in a combination of music, anthropology, linguistics, ethnology, film, occultism, drawing and the visual arts."

American poet Lionel Ziprin recalled the first time Smith, not yet thirty, showed up at the door of his New York apartment: "He looked like the angel of death. When I saw him I jumped back six feet. He looked older than he would ever look afterward, he had these black rings under his eyes, he was carrying a bunch of Indian feathers, a cane and a seal - I don't know if it was Eskimo or what, but it was a statue of a white marble seal intersecting with a circular magic seal. He threw the cane into the room, making me jump, and said: My name is Harry Smith."

Smith claimed to be the secret son of Aleister Crowley, the "Great Beast," the occultist of his era par excellence. It was just one of his many inventions, but it's no coincidence that the booklet accompanying the "Anthology" prominently features Crowley's famous Law of Thelema: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law." At one point, Smith even had himself consecrated bishop of the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica, the ecclesiastical branch of Crowley's Ordo Templi Orientis. Yet it's impossible to reduce him to a single face: "A hermetic scholar, a superb practitioner of magic, a master of the temple, a liar, a rogue, a con man, a spendthrift, a scoundrel, a squanderer, a heartbreaker," is how he was described by someone who knew him closely, biologist Harvey Bialy. It's hard to imagine a better embodiment of the archetype of the trickster, mythology's con artist, the Jungian "divine rogue."

Egocentric, irascible, penniless, chaotic. A contradictory, elusive genius. Fernanda Pivano was dragged along to meet him by Allen Ginsberg, accompanied by Leonard Cohen, when Smith was living in a room at the Chelsea Hotel. "Ginsberg had a real infatuation with him: he thought he was a tremendous artist, an exceptional discoverer of unknown arts, a magnificent draftsman of geometric forms, a sophisticated inventor of jazz rhythms, an erudite expert on Native Americans." In reality, though, what struck her most was his arrogance: "His insistence on asking me for money was a growing annoyance, his peremptory attitude as an inventor of abstract forms stirred in me, with a certain tenderness, old memories of my sweet, humble, illustrious friends from youth."

Years later, when Bob Dylan went to Ginsberg's one night to give him a preview listen of the "Empire Burlesque" tapes, a grouchy old man, half asleep, emerged from the next room, ordering the two of them to stop making noise and let him sleep in peace. It was, once again, Harry Smith, whom Ginsberg had taken in to give him at least a roof over his head. But even if they had started talking to him about music that night, Smith would probably have brushed them off with a shrug: for people like Dylan and Ginsberg, the "Anthology" was the sacred text of the religion of folklore; for Smith, it was just one piece of his investigation into the secret harmony of the universe.

Musica Mundana

On the original cover of the "Anthology Of American Folk Music" there's an image of a strange musical instrument. It's a long resonating box with a single string, surrounded by a series of intersecting circles. It comes from the pages of a seventeenth-century treatise written by the English hermetic philosopher Robert Fludd ("Utriusque cosmi historia"), and it depicts the celestial monochord: an instrument tuned directly by the hand of God, emerging from above amid the clouds.

It is said that the invention of the monochord dates back all the way to Pythagoras and his studies on the relationships between music and mathematics. Not the profane mathematics of the moderns, but mathematics as a sacred science. In that string stretched between heaven and earth, philosophers saw the great chain of being, the model of the world's order according to the different levels of creation, from the empyrean dimension down to the elemental one (fire, air, water and earth). Each level was correlated to the others according to a scheme of musical proportions: a universal balance based on the music of the celestial spheres, the "harmony that Thou dost temper and discern" of Dante's Paradiso.

Musica mundana, Fludd called it, drawing on the categories laid out by Boethius in his musical theory. And it was to that same secret harmony that Harry Smith was pointing too: in the "Anthology", even before Crowley's motto, there appears a quotation from Fludd concerning the musical relationships between the elements ("In elementary music the relation of earth to the sphere of water is 4 to 3, just as there are in earth four quarters of coldness against three of water"). Those same elements are echoed in the colors of the collection's three volumes: the blue of water for the first ("Ballads"), the red of fire for the second ("Social Music"), the green of air for the third ("Songs").

In the end, it was never musical philology that captivated Smith so much as the relationship between music and the mystery of reality, between the pluck of a banjo string and the harmony of the spheres. "As above, so below" goes one of the founding principles of hermeticism: the individual microcosm always reflects the universal macrocosm. "Man the microcosm is placed within a universe in which the parts, the low and the high, conspire together without his knowledge," explains historian of religions Ioan Petru Culianu. "As soon as he has grasped the structure of that conspiracy, the correspondences between the visible universe and its invisible prototype, he will be able to use them to capture the unknown presences waiting on the threshold between the two worlds."

It is this web of correspondences that binds together, in the "Anthology Of American Folk Music", the folk tradition and the mystical one, both in search of an unknown threshold. As Greil Marcus wrote, "it was as if Pythagoras, Fludd, and types like Jilson Setters, Ramblin' Thomas, the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers, Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers, and even Smith himself, all worshipped the same gods." Around those three double-LP volumes, "the whole odd package made the familiar strange, confused what had never been known with what had been forgotten, and what was forgotten with a collective memory that fooled the conscientious mind of every single listener." Perhaps it is precisely because of this that the fascination this collection exerts has managed to reach well beyond the circle of ethnomusicologists. "The 'Anthology' was a mystery, an insistence that, despite every assurance to the contrary, America was a mystery. Despite this, the 'Anthology' was disguised as a textbook. It was an occult document masquerading as an academic treatise on stylistic shifts within an archaic musicology."

Moe Asch, the legendary founder of Folkways Records (the label that in 1952 was the first to press the "Anthology"), recalls his encounter with Smith like this: "He came to me with this enormous collection of records. He was desperately in need of money, as he pretty much always had been throughout his whole life. He told me he wanted to put together a book with all the notes, and he wanted to do it himself, and he wanted to make sure it got published. Naturally I was very interested in this project. So he wrote the notes, typed them up, did the layout, did all the work, we discussed the overall scheme together, but he was the one who put the whole thing together."

Within his vast collection of pre-war 78s (blues, country, hillbilly, gospel, spanning a period between 1926 and 1933), Smith did not necessarily select the best recordings, or the most historically significant ones, but rather those most charged with suggestion in relation to his own highly personal vision, the ones best suited to echo one another. "The 'Anthology Of American Folk Music' is probably the most striking example of how one collector's private tastes can guide (if not dictate) the shape of a historical canon," notes Amanda Petrusich in the New Yorker. A kind of Wunderkammer of American folklore, one that Smith wove together not only from data and information, but also (and above all) from arbitrary juxtapositions, free-form synopses, and esoteric undertones.

To borrow the words of Alessandro Carrera, one can look at the folk tradition through the eyes of a scientist, as in the case of Alan Lomax's field recordings, or through the eyes of a treasure hunter: Harry Smith was without doubt a treasure hunter. "If folk music is studied in universities and archived in libraries, we owe that to uncompromising researchers like Alan Lomax. But if a bunch of clueless kids, with no background in musicology or field research, changed the face of popular music after hearing the 'Anthology', we owe that to irregular, misunderstood and incomprehensible geniuses like Harry Smith."

Three tracks from the "Anthology" (one from each volume) can then become a way of playing at evoking the phases of the alchemical transmutation of matter. A way of paying tribute to Smith's trickster spirit, and of trying, once again, to turn lead into gold through the crackling notes of those old records.

Nigredo

“WIFE AND MOTHER FOLLOWS CARPENTER TO SEA; MOURNS BABE AS SHIP GOES DOWN”.

The style is that of an imaginary news headline, as in all the introductions to the tracks on the "Anthology": this is how Smith presents "The House Carpenter", episode number 3 of the collection (a placement that is anything but random, given his obsession with the symbolic meaning of numbers). Clarence Ashley's voice carries an icy fatalism, nervously accompanied by the banjo. On the surface, it might seem like nothing more than a cautionary song against adultery. But Smith immediately adds: "The supernatural theme of the older versions has almost completely disappeared in America."

We need to go back further, then, all the way to the legendary "Child Ballads", the traditional English and Scottish ballads collected by Francis James Child in the nineteenth century. "The House Carpenter" was once titled "The Daemon Lover", and the one who carried off the protagonist was not a mere lover, but an infernal lover, a demon, a revenant. On the other side of the Ocean, as Alessandro Carrera explains, an attempt was made to forget the true nature of the story: "Believed in and feared, the devil was not to have any place in the manifestations of worship and culture. The ballads and legends in which Satan appeared were expurgated, censored and reworked, and the break from the tradition that had nourished them made them even more arcane and incomprehensible than they already were." And yet, that shadow could never be entirely erased: "Of the supernatural, in the version included in Harry Smith's 'Anthology', what remains is the voice of Clarence Ashley. Ashley has no need to name superhuman beings. The motionless poise of his voice, carved from a rock that is not of this planet, sums up the whole category of the weird, of American uncanniness."

The spirit come from beyond the grave, who leads his lover to her death in "House Carpenter", is the fittest ferryman to guide us through the first phase of the alchemical process, the nigredo, the work in black: matter disintegrates, is reduced to its primordial state, returns to chaos. Dying in order to be reborn in a new form. "They sprung a leak in the bottom of the ship/ And they sunk for to rise no more."

Albedo

After death, resurrection. After disintegration, recomposition. "Solve et coagula", according to the great alchemical law. The albedo is the phase of purification, of rebirth. The call to a new life, the very one that vibrates in the voice of Reverend J.M. Gates: "Must Be Born Again". We are at the start of the second LP of the second volume of the "Anthology", the one devoted to the communal dimension of folklore. Smith notes that hymns like this one, "in which the preacher sings a phrase, often taken from the Bible, and the choir answers with the same phrase, singing one syllable for every note of certain very slow melodies, are considered one of the oldest forms of Christian religious singing in this country." The original recording of the track opened with a fiery sermon by the Georgia preacher, inspired by the Gospel dialogue between Jesus and Nicodemus ("How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb, and be born?"). Smith included in the "Anthology" only the final part, the one in which the words slowly turn into song. And, in the fervor of the call and response, they become an indecipherable language, unknown, otherworldly.

"Frightening and relentless", is how Greil Marcus describes the Reverend's thundering voice. "His voice is deep, severe, and irritated by the weakness of spirit and flesh; irritated by human nature itself." Hearing his words echo still, almost a century later, seems for an instant to erase the bonds of time and space, transporting us into the midst of the faithful of his congregation, thirsting for the announcement of a new life. "Before recording (or musical notation), even the oldest forms of music were either contemporary, or they simply did not exist," observes Erik Davis in his writings on modern esotericism. In this sense, the "Anthology" stands as an example of the "residue of that auditory aura, of the moment when technological reproduction and the commodity form had just begun to capture and irreparably reconfigure the evanescent flow of musical memory."

Rubedo

“Albedo is, in a way, the dawn”, wrote Carl Gustav Jung, “but only rubedo is the rising of the sun”. The red of the final alchemical stage is the color of fire, the fire from which the phoenix is reborn. The sign of transformation, of the reconciliation of opposites. On the third volume of the “Anthology”, there's a track that embodies the idea of metamorphosis in the most visionary way possible: it's called “I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground”, sung by Bascom Lamar Lunsford, a North Carolina lawyer with a passion for folk music. A song built from wishes that, to quote Smith, sound “rather surrealistic in their symbolism”. It's about becoming a mole, or a lizard, about drinking blood and bringing down mountains. As Grayson Haver Currin wrote on Pitchfork, “these incongruous images are a legacy of local oral tradition, but taken together, especially over Lunsford's spring-loaded banjo, they shape an endless mystery. What does Lunsford want us to do with these warped vignettes? Fight the power? Relax and enjoy life? Give up on life altogether? Here's a riddle with no right answer”.

“What the singer wants is at once obvious and incomprehensible”, reflects Greil Marcus. “He wants to free himself from his life and turn into an insignificant, contemptible animal. He doesn't want to see or be seen. He wants to destroy the world and outlive it. That's what he wants. The performance is calm and even, and that calm draws you in: you can listen and you can see what you're listening to. You can let go and imagine what it would be to want what the singer wants”. What he wants is everything and its opposite all at once. It's the sublimation of contradictions, liberation from every binary alternative (body and soul, light and darkness), toward a seemingly impossible synthesis.

Magnum Opus

What did Harry Smith draw from the alchemical furnace of folk music, from the esoteric Atanor of his anthology?

It's almost redundant to point out how the “Anthology” laid the groundwork for the folk revival of the Sixties: “the ‘Anthology’ was our Bible”, declared New York songwriter Dave Van Ronk. “We knew every word of every song, including the ones we hated”. But its influence has kept reverberating over time, right up to the present day.

A crucial role was played by the 1997 CD reissue put out by Smithsonian Folkways (as Moe Asch's record label was renamed after being acquired by the Smithsonian Institution in the Eighties). Before that, as Amanda Petrusich recounts, the only way to hear Harry Smith's legendary collection was “to mail a check to the Folkways office and request that an archivist transfer it onto CD or cassette. Or you could try to hunt down the original LPs in used record shops or at flea markets. The rarity of that collection seemed somehow fitting given its self-styled mythology. It was something talismanic; you had to work for it before you could even listen to it. When I finally got my hands on a copy, in the late Nineties, I discovered that listening to it was a metaphysical experience, in that it seemed to bend the rules of space and time”.

From that point on, tributes and appendices kept coming: in 2000, Revenant Records released the unfinished fourth volume of the “Anthology”, titled “Labor Songs” and dedicated to the element of earth; in 2006, the collective project “The Harry Smith Project” brought the “Anthology”'s legacy up to date for the generation of Wilco, Beck and Beth Orton; in 2020, thanks to another label specializing in American folk history, Dust-To-Digital, came a box set titled “The Harry Smith B-Sides”, containing the B-sides of the 78s Smith used to compile his collection. And in February 2023, Pitchfork gave the “Anthology” a perfect 10 in its review for its retrospective series.

The success of Harry Smith's cabinet of wonders probably lies in the fact that it managed to trace out, within the American musical tradition, a genuine canon: the canon of the weird. “The Old, Weird America”, as the title of Greil Marcus's famous essay put it, and not by chance. Because the weird, to borrow Mark Fisher's now-classic definition, is something that has “to do with a fascination for the outside, for that which lies beyond perception, knowledge and common experience”: “it invokes a sense of wrongness: a weird entity or object is so unusual that it generates the feeling that it shouldn't exist, or at least shouldn't be here. And yet, if the entity or object really is here, then the categories we've used up to now to make sense of the world can't be valid. The weird thing isn't wrong, after all: it must be our own conceptions that are inadequate”.

The folk songs of the “Anthology” have this effect, this unsettling power of suggestion. These are songs in which, as Bob Dylan put it, roses grow out of people's brains and lovers turn out to be geese and swans ready to transform into angels. Things that shouldn't exist, that force us to question our ordinary categories. “Folk music is the only kind where nothing is simple. It never has been simple. It's weird, it's full of legends, myths, the Bible and ghosts”.

“I'm happy to say my dreams came true. I saw America changed through music”, Smith declared at the 1991 Grammy ceremony, when he was given the “Chairman's Merit Award for Lifetime Achievement” for his contribution to American folk music. And yet, if asked where his interest in folk music came from, he would answer that music didn't interest him in itself, only in relation to something else. “I couldn't say what. In a way it has to do with the desire to communicate, with the collecting of objects”. Gathering those recordings was just one of the ways in which Smith, like a shaman poised between two realms, tried to open a portal onto the ineffable, onto the dimension beyond common perception.

Over the course of his life, Smith collected all sorts of things: Ukrainian Easter eggs, Seminole patchwork quilts, paper airplanes, string figures, recordings of the most disparate sounds. Only to lose almost everything, over the course of a life that was always uprooted, always wandering. He was obsessed with cataloguing, with searching out recurring patterns, hidden relationships between things. “All my projects”, he said, “are nothing more than attempts to build a series of objects that allow for some kind of generalization”. A secret map of the essence of the world.

Filmmaker Henry Jones recalls that Smith called this obsession of his “categorical listing for hermetic synthesis”: “He was like a magician shut away in a tower, endlessly trying to turn lead into gold, and that process mattered just as much as the result itself. He insisted that elements could find a random interaction among themselves, to the point where they could become art”. “I remember him telling me one thing in particular, that what matters about reality is the interaction of objects, and what makes things real is the fact that they've been arranged in their present position. In other words, things are ordered in their present state, and that's what makes reality. Reality is grounded in the placement of objects”.

Despite everything, though, after his countless attempts to find some mysterious order in things, it was to music, to song, that Smith returned in the final moments of his earthly existence. Beside him was the poet and writer Paola Igliori, probably his finest biographer. "I stroked his forehead and said I didn't know what to do. He started coughing more and more, and then this powerful chant came out of him. At first I couldn't make out the words, then I understood he was saying: 'I'm dying, I'm dying, I'm dying.' It was so mighty, like some incredible ancient chant. Then he slumped, and I understood his spirit had left his body." That was in 1991. But for Harry Everett Smith, it was just another stop on his long journey.

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