kleph
28-04-2006, 07:30 AM
"I'm glad to say that my dreams came true. I saw America changed through music." - Harry Smith, 1923-1991
Harry Smith was an Oregonian who fled to Berkeley, California in the late 40s and found his beatnik soul. A few years later pulled up stakes and moved to New York City where he did what a lot of people in their early 20s do when they need to make quick cash – he tried to sell his record collection.
But this was no ordinary collection; this was a broad archive of 78-rpm recordings from the 20s and 30s. Instead of purchasing it, Folkways Records president Moses Asch asked Smith to create an anthology and, somehow, Smith was able to whittle down the more than 20,000 records to a mere 84 songs.
http://forum.zgeek.com/gallery/files/2/0/1/hsmith.jpgThe songs that made the cut were chosen for their commercial and artistic appeal. It covered a staggeringly broad range of styles that emerged out of the cultural gumbo of America after the turn of the century - blues, folk, gospel, zydeco, ballads - you name it. Smith later explained he specifically selected songs that were recorded between 1927, when electronic recording made possible accurate music reproduction, and 1932 when the Depression halted folk music sales.
Folkways released the Anthology in 1952 as three volumes of two discs each divided by the classification of ballads, social music and songs. It’s difficult to overstate the impact this record had on American music but it’s also become a work that has substantially altered the way we look at the music of our past and our history itself.
It's full of card sharks, farms threatened by floods, marriage proposals, lost loves, gristly murders and an overall joy de verve that makes every listening a new adventure. It embraces the best and darkest aspects of our natures with equanimity.
“Given his pick of an unimaginable wealth of song, he configured that wealth according to his own vision of America,” commented noted critic Robert Cristgau. “And between strength of material and force of vision, he did nothing less than create a canon.”
It couldn’t have been timed better. The postwar era was already giving way to a growing counterculture movement. The comfortable conservativism of the late 1940s was already becoming claustrophobic and more and more Americans were starting to look beyond its limited confines.
At the time, the commercial recording industry had become rigidly marketed that catered to a few very limited – but profitable – markets. Folk music was typified by the quaint offerings of mainstream artists like Burl Ives. The Anthology broke through that providing a fresh artistic vision that was uniquely alive and uniquely American.
The young artists of the era discovered the almost forgotten voices of Blind Lemon Jefferson, The Carter Family and Richard Rabbit Brown has something unique and important to tell them about their own lives and the time they were living in. The Anthology showed them that all they had to do was look back.
As critic Greil Marcus once said, it revealed "an older, weirder America" lying right under the surface of the one we'd come to know.”
The most noticeable impact of the Anthology was to the emerging hippie/folk movement. How important was the Anthology to these artists? Joan Baez covered nine songs from it, Pete Seeger, 13. Bob Dylan covered six, and adapted numerous others. Woodstock and all it begat would not have happened if this record had not been made.
But the Anthology did more than push the counterculture to the fore in the turbulence of the 60s zeitgeist, it also looked backward and showed the country the sobering result of its once great dream of itself. In the mid 1800s, the poet Walt Whitman saw the need for America to create its own vibrant artistic styles. He detested the copying of foreign forms of music that were dominated by stylistic excess and limpid sentimentality.
"I say no land or people or circumstances ever existed so needing a race of singers and poems differing from all others," he wrote.
He wanted a form of music that struck the chord of the American ideal, that represented the freedom of the frontier and the vibrant sense of living it gave the country. He felt that was the only way to overcome the ills the country had inherited from the old country – class conflict, corrupt politics and institutional decadence.
The Anthology was that dream realized more than a half-century later. But instead of throwing aside the dark and forbidding trappings of the American experience, the artists instead embraced it, understanding doing so was a key element to their identity as Americans.
Clarence Ashley’s "The Coo Coo Bird" is one of the most famous songs on the collection and it epitomizes the strange artistic folkways the Antholgoy travels. Recorded on October 23, 1929 in Johnson City, Tennessee the banjo playing is considered an exemplar of the “clawhammer” style. Ashley’s the “high lonesome sound” was typical of banjo players of the era but it matches the strange song perfectly.
The song, although it resembles a linear ballad resists any straightforward interpretation. It is, instead, filled with strange imagery and phraseology. Musicologist Andrew Hultkrans described it as “an exquisite corpse. A Frankenstein's monster of verse parts exhumed from disparate traditions and sutured into a reanimated whole.
The most dominant is, the Coo Coo bird of the title. The cuckoo is an ancient symbol for the coming of summer but also of fickleness, false love, and infidelity. Understandably, it has been described as a “male” song – filled with boasts, bravado and hidden pain. The listener fills in the gaps of meaning with his own import letting the song cast a different and specific spell on each person who hears it.
And amid the strange tales of lost love, young suicide, hired killers and fatal bar brawls there are some wonderfully funny tales as well. I mean, where else can you find a song that sings the praises of a man’s best hunting dog? I get a kick out of the song every time I hear Jim Jackson’s lyrics”
Old Blue died and I dug his grave/
I dug his grave with a silver spade.
I laid him down with a golden chain/
With every link I called his name.
And our modern cynicism doesn't hold a candle to the brutal pragmatism you find in songs like Richard Rabbit Brown's "James Alley Blues" when he sings, "Sometimes I think you are too sweet to die/And sometimes I wish you were buried alive."
The Anthology has whole frontiers of geography to cover and understanding the whole work can be a lifetime’s pursuit. If pressed to define what the Anthology was about, Marcus responded: 'Dead presidents,' I'd say. 'Dead dogs, dead children, dead lovers, dead murderers, dead heroes, and how good it is to be alive.'”
Which fits perfectly with Whitman’s observation on the aesthetic of our mortality: “Nothing can happen more beautiful than death.”
This essay previously appeared on my website kleph.com (http://www.kleph.com).
©2006 C.J. Schexnayder
Harry Smith was an Oregonian who fled to Berkeley, California in the late 40s and found his beatnik soul. A few years later pulled up stakes and moved to New York City where he did what a lot of people in their early 20s do when they need to make quick cash – he tried to sell his record collection.
But this was no ordinary collection; this was a broad archive of 78-rpm recordings from the 20s and 30s. Instead of purchasing it, Folkways Records president Moses Asch asked Smith to create an anthology and, somehow, Smith was able to whittle down the more than 20,000 records to a mere 84 songs.
http://forum.zgeek.com/gallery/files/2/0/1/hsmith.jpgThe songs that made the cut were chosen for their commercial and artistic appeal. It covered a staggeringly broad range of styles that emerged out of the cultural gumbo of America after the turn of the century - blues, folk, gospel, zydeco, ballads - you name it. Smith later explained he specifically selected songs that were recorded between 1927, when electronic recording made possible accurate music reproduction, and 1932 when the Depression halted folk music sales.
Folkways released the Anthology in 1952 as three volumes of two discs each divided by the classification of ballads, social music and songs. It’s difficult to overstate the impact this record had on American music but it’s also become a work that has substantially altered the way we look at the music of our past and our history itself.
It's full of card sharks, farms threatened by floods, marriage proposals, lost loves, gristly murders and an overall joy de verve that makes every listening a new adventure. It embraces the best and darkest aspects of our natures with equanimity.
“Given his pick of an unimaginable wealth of song, he configured that wealth according to his own vision of America,” commented noted critic Robert Cristgau. “And between strength of material and force of vision, he did nothing less than create a canon.”
It couldn’t have been timed better. The postwar era was already giving way to a growing counterculture movement. The comfortable conservativism of the late 1940s was already becoming claustrophobic and more and more Americans were starting to look beyond its limited confines.
At the time, the commercial recording industry had become rigidly marketed that catered to a few very limited – but profitable – markets. Folk music was typified by the quaint offerings of mainstream artists like Burl Ives. The Anthology broke through that providing a fresh artistic vision that was uniquely alive and uniquely American.
The young artists of the era discovered the almost forgotten voices of Blind Lemon Jefferson, The Carter Family and Richard Rabbit Brown has something unique and important to tell them about their own lives and the time they were living in. The Anthology showed them that all they had to do was look back.
As critic Greil Marcus once said, it revealed "an older, weirder America" lying right under the surface of the one we'd come to know.”
The most noticeable impact of the Anthology was to the emerging hippie/folk movement. How important was the Anthology to these artists? Joan Baez covered nine songs from it, Pete Seeger, 13. Bob Dylan covered six, and adapted numerous others. Woodstock and all it begat would not have happened if this record had not been made.
But the Anthology did more than push the counterculture to the fore in the turbulence of the 60s zeitgeist, it also looked backward and showed the country the sobering result of its once great dream of itself. In the mid 1800s, the poet Walt Whitman saw the need for America to create its own vibrant artistic styles. He detested the copying of foreign forms of music that were dominated by stylistic excess and limpid sentimentality.
"I say no land or people or circumstances ever existed so needing a race of singers and poems differing from all others," he wrote.
He wanted a form of music that struck the chord of the American ideal, that represented the freedom of the frontier and the vibrant sense of living it gave the country. He felt that was the only way to overcome the ills the country had inherited from the old country – class conflict, corrupt politics and institutional decadence.
The Anthology was that dream realized more than a half-century later. But instead of throwing aside the dark and forbidding trappings of the American experience, the artists instead embraced it, understanding doing so was a key element to their identity as Americans.
Clarence Ashley’s "The Coo Coo Bird" is one of the most famous songs on the collection and it epitomizes the strange artistic folkways the Antholgoy travels. Recorded on October 23, 1929 in Johnson City, Tennessee the banjo playing is considered an exemplar of the “clawhammer” style. Ashley’s the “high lonesome sound” was typical of banjo players of the era but it matches the strange song perfectly.
The song, although it resembles a linear ballad resists any straightforward interpretation. It is, instead, filled with strange imagery and phraseology. Musicologist Andrew Hultkrans described it as “an exquisite corpse. A Frankenstein's monster of verse parts exhumed from disparate traditions and sutured into a reanimated whole.
The most dominant is, the Coo Coo bird of the title. The cuckoo is an ancient symbol for the coming of summer but also of fickleness, false love, and infidelity. Understandably, it has been described as a “male” song – filled with boasts, bravado and hidden pain. The listener fills in the gaps of meaning with his own import letting the song cast a different and specific spell on each person who hears it.
And amid the strange tales of lost love, young suicide, hired killers and fatal bar brawls there are some wonderfully funny tales as well. I mean, where else can you find a song that sings the praises of a man’s best hunting dog? I get a kick out of the song every time I hear Jim Jackson’s lyrics”
Old Blue died and I dug his grave/
I dug his grave with a silver spade.
I laid him down with a golden chain/
With every link I called his name.
And our modern cynicism doesn't hold a candle to the brutal pragmatism you find in songs like Richard Rabbit Brown's "James Alley Blues" when he sings, "Sometimes I think you are too sweet to die/And sometimes I wish you were buried alive."
The Anthology has whole frontiers of geography to cover and understanding the whole work can be a lifetime’s pursuit. If pressed to define what the Anthology was about, Marcus responded: 'Dead presidents,' I'd say. 'Dead dogs, dead children, dead lovers, dead murderers, dead heroes, and how good it is to be alive.'”
Which fits perfectly with Whitman’s observation on the aesthetic of our mortality: “Nothing can happen more beautiful than death.”
This essay previously appeared on my website kleph.com (http://www.kleph.com).
©2006 C.J. Schexnayder