Harry Smiths's Anthology of American Folk Music

"John the Revelator" is indeed amazing. Also check out Wim Wenders Soul Of A Man in Scorsese's blues series*, which is where I first heard this song. I think Dylan has played it on his XFM radio show, too. And I just got curious and apparently, that's Blind Willie Johnson's wife Angeline singing the backing.

*Just found this, which is Part 1 of the documentary. I don't remember exactly where "John the Revelator" shows up, but it's all worth watching anyway, so enjoy.

I'd love to hear more from this anthology, though.

"Fatal Flower Garden" is pretty remarkable. Apparently it was originally an anti-Semitic song, which then got changed to anti-Gypsy.

It was neat to hear the line about how all those railroad men will drink your blood like wine in "I Wish I Was a Mole In the Ground," and it made me track down the Bascom Lamar Lunsford album.

Other favorites:
"Fishing Blues"
"Brilliancy Medley"
"John Hardy Was a Desperate Little Man"

The accompanying notes by Harry Smith are classic as well - “Greedy girl goes to Adams Spring with liar; lives just long enough to regret it.”

my favorites: mississippi john hurt, buell kazee, didier hebert, charlie patton. delma lachney & blind uncle gaspard "la danseuse" in particular is gr888.

weirdest is william & versey smith "when the great ship went down". i've heard it many times and still can't wrap my head around the vocals, compelling if not just plain wrong-sounding

i've still not heard vol.4 or whatever one was put out a few years back

Here are my favorites in no particular order: Gonna Die With My Hammer In My Hand, John The Revelator, A Lazy Farmer Boy, Acadian One-Step, Judgement, John Hardy Was A Desperate Little Man, Drunkard's Special.

I really need to listen to this more often, and i'm looking forward to reading more recommendations from everybody. You could probably make a good case for 90% of the songs on it.

I love the Anthology and am sort of disenchanted with it at the same time. There are large swaths of it that, to be honest, I find a bit dull. It's really interesting as an artifact, a kind of holy bible of the 50s/60s folk revival and a collection deliberately designed to dispel the idea that America had a clean, pure, simple past, a document of what its collector saw as avant-garde ideas in *primitive* American musics (I hope I'm not distorting things here), and it contributed to the idea of an American "roots" music that would inform rock and pop.

Now that you can easily find entire collections of Dock Boggs or John Hurt (which has been true for a long time, of course), I think there's something a bit less magical about those few sides - they no longer come across as the hauntings of ghosts from a forgotten era.

I see what you mean and it's a good point, but I am a little surprised to hear it expressed as "disenchantment." I don't know how old you are, but I assume none of us here came of age during the folk revival period. And as far as I can tell, there really was a strong enchantment with these postcards from weird America, and you can tell not only because they said so, but because you can here so many echoes and quotations of exactly THESE songs in so much of canonical rock, folk, folk rock, etc etc. I have a lot of other field recordings, collections, anthologies (not a ton or anything), and I love them on their own terms, but I am enchanted by the Anthology recordings for historical reasons, exactly because they became so influential.

Maybe it would be more fair to just say "tired of" rather than "disenchanted with." I came from sort of a folky family, really discovered this stuff for myself in college, and around the time I got into the Anthology I also got into lots of other Folkways and Alan Lomax recordigs and other such stuff, and most of the time I just prefer other American folk music to a lot of the music on the anthology. But I agree with pretty much everything you're saying.

It is interesting how much the Anthology is like a Bible, not only because it's a canonical text but because it cobbled together a bunch of disparate stuff and gave it the illusion of unity.

FWIW my favorite track on the whole thing is "Old Dog Blue"

For crying out loud, you can't bash the Anthology! That's like bashing Mom and Apple Pie.

I always thought Mississippi John Hurt steals the show, but Clarence Ashley's Coo Coo Bird is one of the best songs too. Another great one: JP Nestor's Train On The Island.

Oh, almost forgot Uncle Dave Macon's Way Down The Old Plank Road, which really is the first rock and roll song. He even gives birth to heavy metal with his cry to "Kill yourself!"

Yeah, "Kill Yourself!" became a meme in my college house.

xpost not to belabor the issue, I am with you and it was similar with me, just wanted to make the point that there's something extra special about the historical role of the Anthology. It would be so funny/interesting to be down at Washington Square Park on a Sunday afternoon in 1959 or whenever and hear the folkies talk about the Anthology in hushed tones like its the keystone.

...I'd also have loved to be around when In The Jungle Groove came out for the same reasons

...and Way Down The Old Plank Road slays!

I love the whole "Social Music" disc.

"C'est Si Triste Sans Luis" by Cleoma Breaux and Joseph Falcon jams.
I love "Judgement," too, the a capella track. Bascom Lamar Lunsford's "Dry Bones" and "I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground" are godlike.

I only have the volume 4 thing! And the other one is so expensive.

Anyway, on volume 4, Memphis Shakedown by the Memphis Jug Band is one of my favourites. It's like a template for all the stoopid music I've ever loved.

Harry Smith was so crafty compiling the Anthology and had all the right prejudices. My all time desert island record, and also the most quotable. I think Hurting's right to say it has this strange unity and seems like a definite whole; Smith pretty much invented a genre with it. There's loads of other old-time music I love but none of it would really fit on the Anthology. The whole thing has a strange sideways feel to it, indirect, like its bubbling up from the subconscious. All those vocal fragments sung with distance to make them sound like chants. Its surreal.

My favourites: Kassie Jones (so loose and perfect, "I ain't good looking but I take my time"), He Got Better Things For You (so immediate I want to explode, is it a woman or a man singing?), Fishing Blues (Henry Thomas and his breathy quill playing are immense), Indian War Whoop (sounds like its stretching on forever, heroic strumming), I Woke Up One Morning In May (enough to make you wake up laughing), Moonshiner's Dance (John Fahey was right about this being the most ingeniusly incongruous song), Way Down The Old Plankroad (tears in the eyes ecstatic), Old Dog Blue, Sail Away Ladies, Down On Penny's Farm, Drunkard's Special - all the banjo songs are excellent. Clearly I love pretty much all of it. KC Moan must be the inspiration for "I'm Going To The Zoo"? Arcadian One Step is house music circa 1929. I knew some of the better known blues stuff before I heard it (Hurt, Patton, Johnson etc) so they seem a little more distinct to me rather than parts of the Anthology.

I agree with most everybody here about how great this comp is -- amazing songs, amazing liners (both the original Smith notes and the reissue essays), amazing flow, etcetera etcetera. But I've always wondered about the actual effect this had on the folk scene of the time. Greil Marcus obviously build it up to be the Rosetta Stone of the folk movement -- but didn't Dylan himself dispute this in an interview a while back?

It was a huge influence on Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber of the Holy Modal Rounders. I've heard other artists of the "folk revival" cover songs off this.

dude, it was a huge influence on everyone of that generation and there are probably THOUSANDS of covers of those songs from that era alone

That thing about Dylan is interesting though - I'd like to hear what he said

found it online -- rolling stone interview with mikal gilmore from 2001

Gilmore: In Invisible Republic -- Greil Marcus' book about you, the Band, the Basement Tapes sessions and the place of all that in American culture [now retitled The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes] -- Marcus wrote about the importance of Harry Smith's legendary Anthology of American Folk Musicand its influence on all of your work, from your earliest to most-recent recordings.

Dylan: Well, he makes way too much of that.

Gilmore: Why do you say that?

Dylan: Because those records were around -- that Harry Smith anthology -- but that's not what everybody was listening to. Sure, there were all those songs. You could hear them at people's houses. I know in my case, I think Dave Van Ronk had that record. But in those days we really didn't have places to live, or places to have a lot of records. We were sort of living from this place to that -- kind of a transient existence. I know I was living that way. You heard records where you could, but mostly you heard other performers. All those people [Marcus is] talking about, you could hear the actual people singing those ballads. You could hear Clarence Ashley, Doc Watson, Dock Boggs, the Memphis Jug Band, Furry Lewis. You could see those people live and in person. They were around. He intellectualizes it too much. Performers did know of that record, but it wasn't, in retrospect, the monumental iconic recordings at the time that he makes them out to be.

It wasn't like someone discovered this pot of gold somewhere. There were other records out that were on rural labels. Yazoo had records out. They weren't all compiled like they are now. In New York City, there was a place called the Folklore Center that had all the folk-music records. It was like a library, and you could listen to them there. And they had folk-music books there. Certain other towns had it, too. There was a place in Chicago called the Old Town School of Folk Music. You could find the stuff there. It wasn't the only thing that people had -- that Anthology of American Folk Music. And the Folkways label itself had many other folk recordings of all kinds of people. They just were highly secretive. And they weren't really secretive because they were trying to be secretive. The people I knew -- the people who were like-minded as myself -- were trying to be folk musicians. That's all they wanted to be, that's all the aspirations they had. There wasn't anything monetary about it. There was no money in folk music. It was a way of life. And it was an identity which the three-buttoned-suit postwar generation of America really wasn't offering to kids my age: an identity. This music was impossible to get anywhere really, except in a nucleus of a major city, and a record shop might have a few recordings of the hard-core folklore music. There were other folk-music records, commercial folk-music records, like those by the Kingston Trio. I never really was an elitist. Personally, I liked the Kingston Trio. I could see the picture. But for a lot of people it was a little hard to take. Like the left-wing puritans that seemed to have a hold on the folk-music community, they disparaged these records. I didn't particularly want to sing any of those songs that way, but the Kingston Trio were probably the best commercial group going, and they seemed to know what they were doing.

What I was most interested in twenty-four hours a day was the rural music. But you could only hear it, like, in isolated caves, like, on a few bohemian streets in America at that time. The idea was to be able to master these songs. It wasn't about writing your own songs. That didn't even enter anybody's mind.

anyhoo, i'm not saying Dylan is the ultimate source on this sort of thing -- far from it, really, the guy is uhh, not always super-reliable -- but it is interesting to hear him speak of the era in this way.

I also got into lots of other Folkways and Alan Lomax recordigs
Hurting, you should read the Joe Boyd book, where he talks about getting into a fistfight with Alan Lomax.

This afternoon I happened to be walking past where the old Folklore Center was and snapped a photo. On the right, where the "Cover Up" place is.

http://bp3.blogger.com/_uu1BrAcvVOk/Rvrfhh_9L7I/AAAAAAAAAPk/VWVat4dpNTg/s1600-h/photo.jpg

Try that again?

http://bp3.blogger.com/_uu1BrAcvVOk/Rvrfhh_9L7I/AAAAAAAAAPk/VWVat4dpNTg/s320/photo.jpg

where the hell is xhuxk, anyway? and Kogan? I know they're both big fans. (I'm one too)

I think Springsteen is a fan, too. He must be, because he covered (to unbelievable effect) How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live, which was taken from the volume 4 which came out a few years back.

Dylan might have a point. Both my mom and aunt were big folkies in the '60s. My mom actually lived in the East Village at the time. I just assumed they new about the Anthology. But they never heard of it. However, they new so many of the songs.

I just finished listening to the entire Anthology. Whew!

And you'll never hear surf folk music again.

Drunkard's Special is super funny:

First night that I went home : drunk as I could be

There's another mule in the stable : where my mule ought to be

Come here honey : explain yourself to me

How come another mule in the stable : where my mule ought to be

Oh crazy oh silly : can't you plainly see

That's nothing but a milkcow : where your mule ought to be

I've traveled this world over : million times or more

Saddle on a milkcow's back : I've never seen before

Second night when I got home : as drunk as I could be

There's another coat on the coat rack : where my coat ought to be

Come here honey : explain this thing to me

How come another coat on the coat rack : where my coat ought to be

Oh crazy oh silly : can't you plainly see

Nothing but a bed quilt : where your coat ought to be

I've traveled this world over : million times or more

Pockets in a bed quilt : I've never seen before

The third night when I went home : drunk as I could be

There's another head on the pillow : where my head ought to be

Come here honey come here : explain this thing to me

How come another head on the pillow : where my head ought to be

Oh crazy oh silly : can't you plainly see

That's nothing but a cabbage head : that your grandma sent to me

I've traveled this world over : million times or more

Hair on a cabbage head : I've never seen before

Seems like these lyrics are slightly different, but oh well, and sorry for hogging all the space.

I have this and love it, but I haven't listened to it that much recently, especially not with the track list handy, so I have to be awfully impressionistic in my memories of the tracks that stand out.

As others have said -- "Old Plank Road", "Dry Bones" (probably my favorite track on the whole anthology), "John The Revelator", "Fishing Blues", a lot of the Cajun stuff on the Social Music disk.

Also, the Cuckoo song, a bunch of the murder ballads, the Alabama shape-note stuff, and -- probably my second-favorite -- "King-Kong-Kitchee-Kitchee-Kime-Me-Oh" (a version of "Froggy Went A-Courting").

I agree with a lot of the above posts -- the Anthology isn't really a canon, per se, it's an advocacy piece for Smith's personal, anti-Lomax views. There's lots to say on both sides of that debate, and both sides were well aired within the 50s folk community. (Sometimes we forget that people weren't any dumber before The Beatles than they are now; probably the opposite.) So Dylan is certainly right that the Anthology wasn't as privileged then as it is now. But I think there's a little anachronism at work in that interview, too -- if Dylan could hear Dock Boggs, it was probably because the Anthology gave him a national audience of sorts. And it's almost too easy to accuse Dylan of anxiety of influence, since 50 things about his persona reflect both the kind of music Smith liked and Smith's view of what it was to be an authentic musician.

Dave Van Ronk's book talks a lot about how the folk scene came about in the 50s (mainly, but not just, in New York) and is a breezy, highly partisan, entertaining read. Keep an eye out for it--The Mayor of Macdougal Street

I've never been able to shake Nelstone's Hawaiians' "Fatal Flower Garden." If the gypsy grants the boy's climactic requests, she'll be caught for his murder. And it's only if she's caught that we'll be able to hear these final requests (in a confession or on trial, say) which have no sense of struggle or even fear in them and which the meat-and-no-potatoes voices do nothing to mitigate. It reminds me of a real life incident so fucked-up that I don't even want to recall it. Still, there's a strong suggestion that the gypsy will be the only one ever to hear the boy's last words. And this is the apotheosis of the often horror-inducing void at the center of so many of these songs, the paradoxical feeling that they came from nowhere and went right back there. You can hear it in the much easier to take last verse of "Willie Moore" where we only get the initials of the composer but not the reason why the matter of authorship is even brought up. You can also hear it in a faux Anthology song like "The Long Black Veil" or even something like The Platters' popism fight song "The Great Pretender." At least the ultra-catchiness of "King Kong Kitchie Kitchie Ki-Me-O" mitigates its own murderous tale.

But the feeling is paradoxical because WE are hearing the boy's last words. WE too know that she visits those hills in a long black veil. It's the kind of thing that would cause someone to overestimate the isolation of the Anthology performers and songs which is exactly what Harry Smith did. The fact that there are other, different versions of "Fatal Flower Garden" (amongst MANY other songs) attests to that fact.

As for the Anthology itself, great as much of it is I find it could easily be winnowed to two CDs (okay three). Much of the social music on disc three could be junked (the religious stuff on disc four is the best ever). And only three or four of the blues track on disc six would stay. In short, Anthology doesn't hold a candle to my all-time fave box set, American Pop: An Audio History. Nine CDs, ace from start to finish, and its Blind Lemon Jefferson track cuts all three on Anthology.

P.S. Richard (Rabbit) Brown does sound like Cat Stevens.

maria just got this for me for my birthday. wasn't that nice of her? i have heard a lot of it, but it's nice to have the whole thing in one place. it's going next to vol.4 on my shelf. it's the perfect gift: something i never wanted to shell out that much money for (kinda always hoping i could find a vinyl copy that wasn't too expensive too) but that i always wanted.

Harry Smith didn't think "Fatal Flower Garden" was a good song. I agree. You want chills, try "Ommie Wise".

got some barnes & noble gift cards for xmas so i got this box set.

i'm pretty blown away by it.

i don't know if there's much new that can be said about it w/o turning into like b-league greil marcus and shit...but anyway it's just...amazing

it really is as great and spooky and fun as they say.

right now, my favorite stuff is the 7 or 8 fiddle songs that begin the "social music" (vol 2) discs....so hypnotic..

but yeah i feel like i will be listening to this for months and still finding new stuff to love.

also this box set is BEAUTIFUL and about as good a defense for physical music packaging as i've ever seen.

i really like those social music discs, too....if you can find it, vol. 4 is also well worth seeking out. and along the same lines, there is a really nice 9 cd set titled American Pop: An Audio History that i highly recommend, if you can be bothered

Be bothered. American Pop: An Audio History is the greatest box set of all-time. Much richer than Anthology and it still has a fair of spookiness to offer (e.g., "Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground," "Last Kind Word Blues").

Is Vol. 4 really that difficult to find now?

those fiddle tunes are what i listen to most frequently.

I began before Christmas an attempt at getting ILXors to cover songs from the Anthology in whatever manner they chose. I got a few submissions, but would love it if we could really work that out. So please do it, send me an mp3 of yourself singing.

"Is Vol. 4 really that difficult to find now?"

I believe it's in print so the answer is no.

timely revival, I listened to all of Vols 2 and 3 on the iPod for our (GF and I) very subdued NYE celebrations. Probably the first time I've done that in almost ten years, and it was just as fucking fantastic as I remembered.

and yeah, Vol. 4 is worth it just for the great notes and the Memphis Jug Band tracks alone.

Is Vol. 4 really that difficult to find now?

vinyl is hard to find. i picked a copy of american primitive instead of it once and really regret it. expensive, too, BUT with a harry smith POSTER!

volume four vinyl is beautiful. they did a wonderful job on that whole package.

So this thing is really incredible. It took me a few years to really get into it, but it's such an essential document and just packed with brilliant performances.

yeah it is an amazing listen, that's for sure. totally withstands all the hype.
hey, this thread mentions that American Pop: An Audio History box set -- is that available anywhere? Totally expensive through marketplace sellers on amazon currently. could anyone hook me up w/ cd-rs or anything?

Checking this out from the public library in high school was a total game changer for me.

Actually, I talked a very long time ago on ILM about Buell Kazee and got one of the best emails ever, from one of his grandkids, about Buell's life and music. The craziest thing in it was Buell's wife had the same first name as me, spelled in a less than common way that is also the same as my spelling (Abb13). Other than that, it was mostly generic stuff about "I remember he'd take me on his knee and sing to me when I was a little boy," but still one of those rare, cool experiences where an internet stranger reaches out to you with wonderful anecdotes.

^^ love these experience, great story!

So I've devoured both the Anthology and American Pop. where do i go next?

I don't really know what American Pop is, but you could just dive into the Yazoo & County records catalogs for some of the finest stuff available imo.

Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, Volume IV
American Primitive Vol 2
The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of
Good For What Ails You: Music of the Medicine Shows

I wish I was a mole in the ground

that music of the medicine shows comp is great--"I heard the voice of a porkchop"!

Snrub, after American Pop (A.A.P. = you life will never be the same again), I started exploring the artists that really made the deepest impression. But here are some other suggestions:

Pop Music: The Early Years 1890-1950 is definitely your next stop because it's wall-to-wall American Pop unlike American Pop.

The Golden Age of Entertainment - Reader's Digest box on vinyl. Not sure if it's on CD but it's findable at thrift stores for cheap. Lotsa cheesy Hollywood tunes.

Make your peace with Broadway and explore one of the Great American Songbook dudes. I dig I Got Rhythm: The Smithsonian George Gershwin Collection. In general, stick with cheesy, old, and Hollywood when it comes to the GAS dudes.

I have some Frémeaux & Associés twofers that you'd dig like From Cake-Walk To Ragtime and, esp. Rock N' Roll 1927-1938 with The Boswell Sisters gulping title track and Louis Armstrong's proto-punk "Swing That Music" particular standouts.

Anything on Archeophone, esp. from the great, biopic-ready Bert Williams.

You Ain't Talkin' to Me: Charlie Poole and the Roots of Country Music

White Country Blues, 1926-1938: A Lighter Shade Of Blue

I love the Art Deco series, esp. the Fred Astaire, Eddie Cantor, and Al Jolson ones.

And pick up a copy of the three-DVD box of The Jazz Singer (do this first, actually).

And see Palmy Days starring Eddie Cantor if you can.

I started exploring the artists that really made the deepest impression.

Actually, that didn't turn out to be so fruitful, e.g. James Reese Europe (Reid Badger's biography is fantastic, though, Geechie Wiley, Alec Wilder (ugh, that GAS book of his is the PITS!!), etc. Which only serves the further augment the genius of American Pop.

I began before Christmas an attempt at getting ILXors to cover songs from the Anthology in whatever manner they chose. I got a few submissions, but would love it if we could really work that out. So please do it, send me an mp3 of yourself singing.

― ian, Friday, January 2, 2009 3:22 PM

sent you a buell kazee cover iirc

can't believe more ppl didn't take you up on this awesome offer tbh

Oh and I'm waaay down to trade American Pop for That Devilin' Tune.

yeah, i think i only got two songs! maybe i should try again.

i will do one. i'll have to recruit some friends and get drunk, but it would be a good time.

deserves its own thread imo

yes plz

some great reccs. let me also throw out:
http://www.amazon.com/Jewface-Various-Artists/dp/B000J3Q0Y8

Some other good stuff:
http://www.amazon.com/Afro-American-Spirituals-Work-Songs-Ballads/dp/B00000DC6N
http://www.amazon.com/Awake-My-Soul-Two-Disc-Special/dp/B0012IU2FW

don't forget about alan lomax's "sounds of the south" box. not only did moby not kill it, but shirley collins assisted in the recording! (read "america over the water" for some interesting if somewhat unrevealing anecdotes about this time)

i would do a cover of one of these songs!

I like the CD of Bascom Lamar Lunsford's that they put out on Folkways, "Ballads, Banjo Tunes And Sacred Songs Of Western North Carolina." Mermaid Song is one of my favorite songs.

^^^

yes! bascom was a one-of-a-kind dude. like, i got the feeling he's the guy harry smith wanted to be, but he was too late and too far removed.

Oh yeah how could I forget Jewface??? Totally classic comp as is Mocean Worker's amaaaaaaaaaazing house (or 'Jewtronica') remix of Ada Jones' "Under The Matzos Tree."

Sounds of the South boxset is amazing!

has anybody seen this site: http://www.folkstreams.net/pub/FilmsByTitle.php kind of gave me more of a visual perspective on some of this stuff

I began before Christmas an attempt at getting ILXors to cover songs from the Anthology in whatever manner they chose. I got a few submissions, but would love it if we could really work that out. So please do it, send me an mp3 of yourself singing.

― ian

Deserves its own thread. Did I send you mine? (Don't worry, it's better than the wire cover was)

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_4Kb-h3o7c9I/Sc1AVUjbWsI/AAAAAAAAAIU/daoE-eqV62c/s400/White+Spirituals2.jpg
http://homepage2.nifty.com/zzz-blues/lp-va-new/va-new115.jpg

http://www.austinchronicle.com/binary/200b/music_phases3.jpg

http://www.oldhatrecords.com/images/MtnBalladsLP.jpg

<IMG SRC=http://www.countrymusichalloffame.org/assets/Uploads/Creations-from-the-Collection/CMF-Records/Bristol-Sessionslrg.jpg>;

http://www.countrymusichalloffame.org/assets/Uploads/Creations-from-the-Collection/CMF-Records/Bristol-Sessionslrg.jpg

http://www.wirz.de/music/rbf/grafik/064.jpg

Some gorgeous, haunting stuff (and novelty tunes of varying mileage) on this compilation:
http://www.amazon.com/Classic-Ragtime-Offshoots-Various-Artists/dp/B000007QGR/

dem white folks in that top picture up dere is in a church not a field!

is sounds of south lp tracks the same as the cd series? i think there is some stuff on those thats on the anthology as well iirc..

jug one is a favourite - my flatmate had once and i tried unsuccessfully to lift it. it's great party music too!

i thought the anthology was made entirely of commercial recordings, the lomax recordings being a separate entity altogether.

maybe its just that moby track fucking with my brain... will pull lp and have a look later... i get confused kinda easily with alot of these comps

i thought the anthology was made entirely of commercial recordings, the lomax recordings being a separate entity altogether.
this is correct -- lomax released field recordings of people singing on their porches etc. shirley assisted!

(hey, who's "if you can believe your eyes and ears"? ya sent me a webmail about american pop, but i can't seem to find you here to reply back ... )

Do any of you know anything about this album?

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51elAE0O-nL._SL500_AA280_.jpg

I found it while hunting down Clarence Ashley / Gwen Foster songs I don't have and it looks really really cool.

Also, I started looking for any collections thematically arranged around prohibition. This is the only thing I could find tho,

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/519YY8NMF6L._SL500_AA300_.jpg

And tbh, the tracklist for that is kinda weak. I mean, great songs, but I was hoping for something more than a bunch of Duke Ellington + Louis Armstrong songs I've already heard. Do any of you know anything that's kinda thematically like this but better? (There was this great New Yorker piece a few years ago about Jake Walk + the Blues: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/09/15/030915fa_fact_baum)

The known jake leg songs: http://www.ibiblio.org/moonshine/drink/jakesongs.html

I wish this was available as a compilation somewhere.

Have we talked about making an early American music thread yet?

xxpost The New Lost City Ramblers did an album of prohibition & moonshine songs. Not quite real old-time, but old-timey enough.

I began before Christmas an attempt at getting ILXors to cover songs from the Anthology in whatever manner they chose. I got a few submissions, but would love it if we could really work that out. So please do it, send me an mp3 of yourself singing.

― ian

I didn't see this one...

I have that People Take Warning set, and it's... ok.
The tracks are mostly on topical subjects, commentaries on recent news events and suchlike - they were cash-in discs at the time so weren't generally amazing examples of music even when new. I haven't spent loads of time with the set, so there may be some gems in there for all I know, but what I've heard has mostly been underwhelming. The selections are more of historical and cultural interest rather than musical for the most part.

I don't think the Goodbye Babylon set has been mentioned, but man alive, there's some astounding music in that collection, and the packaging is beautiful.

hey, who's "if you can believe your eyes and ears"? ya sent me a webmail about american pop, but i can't seem to find you here to reply back ... )
hey - tachikawa66atyahoodotyaddayadda

ah, sweet - will email you shortly.
and yeah, people take warning is super interesting but there is some really BAD stuff on it. i liked listening to it, but it's not as strong musically as a lot of the sets mentioned in this thread.

IIRC even the sleeve notes of that People Take Warning are vaguely apologetic about the quality.

yeah i don't think they were making any grand claims for a lot of it -- some of it is pretty horrifying how it exploits tragedy with the most mawkish, manipulative drivel.

Snrub, after American Pop (A.A.P. = you life will never be the same again),

You ain't a-kiddin'.

That's What I Call Sweet Music: Not really sure this belongs in the thread, but this is a collection of "dance orchestras" of the 1920s. Sort of the opposite of what was going on in pop music at the time to the Anthology. This is music made purely to have a good time, tales of falling in love at 11:30 on a Saturday night and being "as happy as I can be 'cause the one that I love loves me." The 1920s wasn't all hard times in the country, y'know.

The Other Anthology of American Folk Music: Compiled by some fan on the Internet, this is four more discs of rural American folk music from about the same era. The liner notes convey the brilliance of this collection far better than I ever could: "On this collection, there is 1 train wreck, 1 sinking ship, a lot of folks leaving if they ain't already gone, 8 murder victims, 4 dead mothers, 1 dead father, 1 dead steel driver, 6 dying men, 4 premonitions of death, fortunately plenty saved souls, 9 gamblers and 6 drunks that we know of, 2 coke addicts, 6 cheaters, a lot of shots fired, 5 convicts, 1 escape, 1 ventriloquist, 1 mentally ill jug band, at least a dozen broken hearts, too many po' folks with the blues, and 1 $10,000 reward offered to a chicken."

Kentucky Mountain Music: "Now folks, we're gonna play some good dance music. If it ain't right, get right. Get ready now let's go! Hot dog!" HOW has that not been sampled by some aspiring techno DJ? Aaaanyway, this is seven CDs worth of fiddlin' string bands from Kentucky. Yes there are some gospel and ballads thrown in but mostly this is all about the fiddlin' hoedowns and the banjo tunes. This is the music of good-time feel good dances. If your favorite songs on the Anthology of American Folk Music are "Indian War Whoop" or "The Wild Wagoner" definitely check this out. Rock music existed in the 1920s and here's your proof. These mountain folks would party at the hoedowns with sweaty rural hedonistic abandon and it fucking rules.

People Take Warning: AWESOME! Yes it is horribly exploitative how the artists cashed in on tragedy, but man alive does it have some amazing songs on it. Of course y'all know "When That Great Ship Went Down" and "Kassie Jones" from the Anthology, but there is so much more. All this sad string accompaniment and lyrics like "Oh how sad to know they never can come back" and "But we can't replace those brave souls who lost their lives that day." Very exploitative, but also very fascinating. For a great article about these "event songs" (as they called them) I highly suggest you read this article from 1929. That whole book is amazing, btw. And am I a horrible evil person if I find "Ohio Prison Fire" one of the most hilarious songs ever recorded? "Oh Jimmy! JIMMY!!! It's MOTHER!!"

And I also echo everyone here re: the brilliance of Bascom Lamar Lunsford. Supposedly there're plans to release a ten-CD boxed set of every single one of his Library of Congress recordings called The Memory Collection, but Folkways is a bit hesitant due to an apparent lack of interest. I'd buy one!

After spending many years with this, I really don't find it to be an especially good compilation. There are a fair number of great songs, but there's so much material I find unmemorable. Plenty of better material in all of the genres presented. Cool packaging, cool concept, great mythology around it, but when there are so many old recordings in these genres available I rarely feel that much need to listen to it.

i kind of agree with that. to be honest in terms of anthologies of folk music i find myself listening to art rosenbaum's "art of of field recording" collection more than anything else. it's not a colelction of historic recordings or anything (most were done in the past 30 years iirc) but i find it more engaging that a lot of stuff on harry smith's collection.

that said, it's a pretty meaningful and special anthology for many reasons, some of which you already mentioned.

Yeah it's almost more like a work of conceptual art or a piece of (extremely) revisionist musicology, like a deliberate attempt to create a mythical past. I feel like I've spent a long time trying to force myself to like all the music on the anthology when like 60-70% of it does nothing for me.

it was also the only example of that type of music that was known enough to be available/at the library -- there may be "better" compilations out there, or albums, or spotify or whatever, but part of its appeal for me is that everyone knows it because it was the only thing they had a chance to hear. so there's the element, for me, of it genuinely being popular folk music known to multiple generations of people. that appeals to my sense of togetherness and humanity almost as much as the music itself appeals to me. there are other people who know that version of "the house carpenter", and that mere fact makes the anthology valuable to me.

not saying it should matter to anyone else for whatever reason, but that's one reason it matters to me.

xp This is seriously a case of 2013 goggles, guys. Maybe it's hard to imagine a time when you couldn't literally spend years only listening to Awesome Tapes from Africa, or whatever, but this box was / is a revelation. It's beyond reproach.

That said, interesting that this topic came up today, because last night I watched the Harry Smith documentary that's tagged on as a 'bonus' feature of that dreadful LA concert DVD with Elvis Costello, Steve Earle, Lou Reed, etc, and WOOF - awful. The worst sort of talking-head style documentary combined with clips from that abysmal concert. Cut from Allen Ginsberg or Greil Marcus talking about how 'magical' the music of the anthology is to Petra fucking Hayden or Beth Orton or Gavin Friday performing some shitty version of one of the songs. Talk about cognitive dissonance. Also, no mention of Fahey (not to even mention his Grammy-winning liner notes), one small mention of Lomax, and a serious dearth of archival footage. What a waste of time.

Oh it's definitely 2013 goggles, I'm not denying that.

And all those obligatory, reverent covers of Anthology songs are exactly another reason I've come to like the Anthology a bit less. Also I don't really like Greil Marcus and his "Old Weird America" concept.

you guys do have a good point on the direness of snooty reverence, but that doesn't have anything to do with the music. it's just an unfortunate byproduct and what we have to suffer through if we want to have folk music. right? surely there are other folk musics where the interpretation (or the interpretation of the interpretation) is godawful but the song is still good? and even then, some people like it. just not us.

The Anthology is really not as good as it could be because, in the end, it was just the best parts of some guy's record collection. There are loads of great songs he could've included but he just didn't know about them.

i dunno guys, it's a pretty great collection of music. not sure i can speak for its ultimate importance or w/e, but wow, the songs on there. and smith's write ups are hilarious/fun. only thing that i hated about it was that sticker that was on the front of the CD reissue that said "this is gangsta folk!"

How come another coat on the coat rack where my coat oughta be?

I love that one! "Oh crazy...silly...can't you plainly see?" - HA! "Drunkard's Special," right?

yeah, that song is one of my favorites. And Old Dog Blue. Like I said, there are a fair number of great songs, but there's also a ton of skippable material.

although when I think about it, a lot of the skippable stuff for me is concentrated in Vol 2

How come another coat on the coat rack where my coat oughta be?

― Trip Maker, Friday, July 26, 2013 10:52 AM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark

ha see immediately after reading this my brain heard "can't you plainly see?"
the head of cabbage is the funniest part

I just really like the way that he enunciates COAT on the COAT RACK.
This collection has more than a few immortal tracks on it.

a lot of the skippable stuff for me is concentrated in Vol 2

madness

imo much of the powerful spell these records cast is due to the sequencing, which is flawless.

The importance of the Anthology of American Folk Music realllllly cannot be overstated. A lot of people first became aware of this music because of Smith's collection -- there was not another way to hear this music in 1958 -- that was it, or find the original 78s, which even then -- only thirty years or so after they were pop music -- were just totally lost from the public consciousness. Outside of a small (VERY small) group of record collectors people were largely unaware of this stuff. It exposed a whole new generation of people to music that otherwise might never have entered their ears. And it continues to do that still, which I think is awesome.

Snrub's point is also accurate -- after listening to thousands of old records, these were Smith's favorites, or things he found that fit into his mythology -- but even though he listened to thousands of records, there's no way he could have heard everything, nor possessed everything, nor had copies of the records in good enough shape to warrant reissuing.

Personally I find the quality of the material to be incredibly high. I've been listening to the Anthology a lot lately, actually, because it's one of the few CDs/sets I keep in the car. Yesterday particularly I was seized by Prince Albert Hunt's "Wake Up Jacob" which, for some reason, never made much of an impact on me before. I thought that while it was good, it was not the match of Brilliancy Medley or Sail Away Ladies (or a dozen other fiddle performances not on the Anthology.) Yesterday it hit me that it was in fact one of the greatest things I've ever heard! it's beautiful, the tone of the fiddle is marvelous, the dynamics and changes in tempo are thrilling. I could listen to it all day. While I suppose relistening is key to getting a firmer grip on some of the material -- there's just too much for anyone to digest with just a few runs through.

Some of the absolute finest records made in the 20s & 30s found their way onto the Anthology -- "Willie Moore" ; "Peg & Awl" ; "Frankie" ; "Drunkard's Special"* ; both of the Sacred Harp Recordings, which may not be your favorite, are to me, incredible. ; "Shine On Me" ; "Fifty Miles of Elbow Room" ; "Sugar Babe" ; "Mole In The Ground" ; "Georgia Stomp" ; "Single Girl" ; "Way Down The Old Plank Road" ; "Better Things For You" ; "Fishing Blues" -- all these and more are fucking masterpieces imo.

* there are other great recordings of this song, some under the name "Three Nights Experience" or "Three Nights Drunk" like here --
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cNjh5nn7E0
I particularly love Earl Johnson's version, but it's not on youtube.

oops, not 1958 -- 1952!!!!!

"Indian War Woop"... "Old Dog Blue" ... "I Woke Up One Morning In May" and "James Alley Blues" i mean, jesus christ, it's wall to wall bangers!

http://katiedozier.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/haters-gonna-hate.jpg

Ian OTM

I second this motion and hereby move to close this argument in favor of the anthology.

i actually find it kind of fascinating to hear what works/doesn't work for certain listeners. it's interesting to me, because the reactions are so varied to this stuff. and there such a wide variety of styles on the collection, that i guess it's only natural that certain sections are less appealing to some people. i am just a huge fan of this music. you can quibble all day long about it, of course -- why did Smith include those cajun songs and not, say, Amede Ardoin or Dennis McGee? Who knows? Maybe they were the only ones he had. Maybe they were the ones he had in the best condition, or that fit his criteria for inclusion, or maybe that was just a choice he made.

i like this anthology a lot. it's one of the best anthologies out there IMO.

This was one of the first things I downloaded ten years ago, when I started down that road to perdition. Burned it all onto CD, got through it, but I was consuming a lot of stuff back then. It's something I need to go back to.

This collection was my gateway into American old-time music. As a result, I now own a shitload of CDs/LPs and four banjos...... Absolute classic.

sorry to derail, but I love the Dubliners' version of the "Drunkard's Special" - i.e. their "Seven Drunken Nights".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db03QGHwvtU

As I went home on Monday night as drunk as drunk could be
I saw a horse outside the door where my old horse should be
Well, I called me wife and I said to her: Will you kindly tell to me
Who owns that horse outside the door where my old horse should be?

Ah, you're drunk,
you're drunk you silly old fool,
still you can not see
That's a lovely sow that me mother sent to me
Well, it's many a day I've travelled a hundred miles or more
But a saddle on a sow sure I never saw before

And as I went home on Tuesday night as drunk as drunk could be
I saw a coat behind the door where my old coat should be
Well, I called me wife and I said to her: Will you kindly tell to me
Who owns that coat behind the door where my old coat should be

Ah, you're drunk,
you're drunk you silly old fool,
still you can not see
That's a woollen blanket that me mother sent to me
Well, it's many a day I've travelled a hundred miles or more
But buttons in a blanket sure I never saw before

And as I went home on Wednesday night as drunk as drunk could be
I saw a pipe up on the chair where my old pipe should be
Well, I called me wife and I said to her: Will you kindly tell to me
Who owns that pipe up on the chair where my old pipe should be

Ah, you're drunk,
you're drunk you silly old fool,
still you can not see
That's a lovely tin whistle that me mother sent to me
Well, it's many a day I've travelled a hundred miles or more
But tobacco in a tin whistle sure I never saw before

And as I went home on Thursday night as drunk as drunk could be
I saw two boots beneath the bed where my old boots should be
Well, I called me wife and I said to her: Will you kindly tell to me
Who owns them boots beneath the bed where my old boots should be

Ah, you're drunk,
you're drunk you silly old fool,
still you can not see
They're two lovely Geranium pots me mother sent to me
Well, it's many a day I've travelled a hundred miles or more
But laces in Geranium pots I never saw before

And as I went home on Friday night as drunk as drunk could be
I saw a head upon the bed where my old head should be
Well, I called me wife and I said to her: Will you kindly tell to me
Who owns that head upon the bed where my old head should be

Ah, you're drunk,
you're drunk you silly old fool,
still you can not see
That's a baby boy that me mother sent to me
Well, it's many a day I've travelled a hundred miles or more
But a baby boy with his whiskers on sure I never saw before