Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music ─ America Changed Through Music

Released in 1952, The Anthology of American Folk Music was the singular vision of the enigmatic artist, musicologist, and collector Harry Smith (1923-1991). A collection of 84 commercial recordings of American vernacular and folk music originally issued between 1927 and 1932, the Anthology featured an eclectic and idiosyncratic mixture of blues and hillbilly songs, ballads old and new, dance music, gospel, and numerous other performances less easy to classify. Where previous collections of folk music, both printed and recorded, had privileged field recordings and oral transmission, Smith purposefully shaped his collection from previously released commercial records, pointedly blurring established racial boundaries in his selection and organisation of performances. Indeed, more than just a ground-breaking collection of old recordings, the Anthology was itself a kind of performance on the part of its creator. Over the six decades of its existence, however, it has continued to exert considerable influence on generations of musicians, artists, and writers. It has been credited with inspiring the North American folk revival - “The Anthology was our bible,†asserted Dave Van Ronk in 1991, “We all knew every word of every song on it†- and with profoundly stimulating Bob Dylan. After its 1997 release on CD by Smithsonian Folkways, it came to be closely associated with the so-called “Americana†and “Alt-Country†movements of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Following its sixtieth birthday, and now available as a digital download and re-released on vinyl, it is once again a prominent icon in numerous musical currents and popular culture more generally. This is the first book devoted to such a vital piece of the large and complex story of American music and its enduring value in American life. Reflecting the intrinsic interdisciplinarity of Smith’s original project, this collection contains a variety of new perspectives on all aspects of the Anthology. Contributions explore the history of the collection, its place in popular culture, Smith’s editorial processes, the recordings themselves and the collection’s legacy and influence. The volume helps to reshape our understanding and appreciation of this much-vaunted, but little-considered, musical statement. Smith declared, "I felt social change would result from it [...] I imagined it as having some kind of social force for good." In his speech at the Grammy Awards in 1991, when he received a Chairman's Merit Award for his contributions to American folk music, Smith famously claimed: “I’m glad to say that my dreams came true. I saw America changed through music.â€

Ross Hair is a lecturer in American Literature and Culture at the University of East Anglia, UK. He is the author of Ronald Johnsona€?s Modernist Collage Poetry (2010), and his essays on modern American and British poetry have appeared in, among other publications, the Journal of Modern Literature, Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, and Texas Studies in Literature and Language. His poetry has been published in numerous little magazines and in 2012 Longhouse Publishers published his poem, a€?An Anthology Gathered for Shirley Collins.a€ Thomas Ruys Smith is currently Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Culture at the University of East UK. He is the author of two books, River of Dreams: Imagining the Mississippi Before Mark Twain (2007) and Southern Queen: New Orleans in the Nineteenth Century (2011). He is also the editor of Blacklegs, Card Sharps and Confidence Men: Nineteenth-Century Mississippi River Gambling Stories (2010), and, with Prof. Sarah Churchwell, Must Read: Rediscovering American Bestsellers, from Charlotte Temple to The Kite Runner (2012). Alongside those longer works, he has written numerous articles on a wide variety of topics - outlaws and highwaymen, country music, antebellum religious movements - for various journals and collections. At present, he is at work on a study of the life-long relationship between Mark Twain and the Mississippi River.