An american original: best known for his pioneering "Anthology of American Folk Music," artist and mystic polymath Harry Smith was the subject of a recent two-day symposium at the Getty Institute - Report From Los Angeles

Michael Duncan

Cult figure Harry Smith (1923-1991) was a suitably idiosyncratic, 20th-century Renaissance man, working as an abstract film-maker, painter, musicologist, anthropologist, theoretician, self-mythologizer and connoisseur of arcana. His most important achievement, "The Anthology of American Folk Music," a three-volume, six-LP compilation of '20s and '30s recordings released in 1952 (and reissued as a CD set by Smithsonian Folkways in 1997), did nothing less than change the course of popular music and remains a quirky yet defining touchstone of American culture. Both his handpainted abstract films of the '40s and his later animations made from cutout engravings have solid reputations as key works of American avant-garde cinema. Colleague of Allen Ginsberg, Robert Frank, Jonas Mekas, Jordan Belson and Percy Heath, inspiration to Bruce Conner, Bob Dylan, Beck and hordes of others, he is a certifiable underground legend.

Smith's overall significance, however, is difficult to assess, since so many of his art works, films, collections and writings are lost, unfinished or remain to be unearthed. Two recently published volumes of interviews with the fiercely original, erratic artist and those who knew him have added considerably to knowledge and to conjecture about Smith. (1) The posthumous release of Volume Four of the Anthology (Revenant Records, 2000) nearly 50 years after its compiling has sparked an upsurge of interest, highlighted by a two-day symposium in Los Angeles with related screenings and concerts sponsored by the Getty Research Institute.

The symposium--the brainchild of Getty Institute director Thomas Crow and one expression of the theme for the 2000-01 Getty scholar program, "Reproductions and Originals"--sought to synthesize the wide-ranging achievements of this eccentric postmodernist avant la lettre. Bringing together colleagues of the artist and diverse scholars and writers, including P. Adams Sitney, Annette Michelson, Robert Cantwell and Greil Marcus, the symposium seemed an unlikely venture for the Getty, yet one perhaps not surprising for the author of Modern Art in the Common Culture. A child of the '60s, Crow clearly feels a generational accord with the Anthology and its implications for popular music. His theoretical approach to Smith's offbeat enterprises turned out to be an apt one, particularly with respect to the Anthology. The methodology of this extraordinarily artful compendium of widely divergent song styles and themes fascinatingly presages a variety of postmodern practices such as appropriation, systematizing and DJ sequencing.

The Anthology was culled from Smith's massive 78-rpm record collection of traditional songs originally recorded (as he wrote in the idiosyncratic 28-page illustrated booklet that accompanied the set) "between 1927, when electronic recording made possible accurate music reproduction, and 1932, when the Depression halted folk music sales." (2) In three double-LP sets--"Ballads," "Social Music" and "Songs"--Smith mixed a wide variety of mostly rural music, juxtaposing country blues, Cajun instrumentals, English-derived ballads, hillbilly warbles, topical novelty songs, and Southern gospel hymns and shouts.

The commercial intentions of the original 78s suited Smith's interest in music made for regional constituencies rather than recorded by ethno-musicologists. He chose the Depression as a cutoff date, believing that soon after the economy rekindled, performances became tainted by the homogenizing tastes of the burgeoning movie and recording industries. (3) Smith's preference for unique, quirky performances--for what he called "exotic music"--directed attention to the music's primal roots. The extensive discography and bibliography in the Anthology booklet trace the folk origins of each of the 84 songs; its alphabetical index also catalogues the songs' common themes and references, such as "Dreams mentioned on record" (4 entries), "Law mentioned on record" (13 entries) and "Death mentioned on record" (26 entries). Like a field anthropologist, Smith provides data and case studies ripe for cultural theory.

Smith's unusual conceptual take seems to have been motivated by a firm belief in what might today be called "deep structure." He sought formal correspondences among different mediums as a means of tapping into more profound levels of significance. For example, according to Smith, the lines and shapes of many of his geometric paintings and drawings correspond stroke-for-stroke to the rhythm changes in bebop compositions by Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk. (4) His first three short films (Films 1-3, 1946-49) are animated so that the movements of geometric forms are in sync with the rhythms of songs recorded during a 1947 performance by Gillespie's band in Paris. (5) Although Smith's efforts relate to a long-standing filmic tradition combining music and abstract imagery, he developed his own techniques for hand-painting, staining and batiking abstract images frame by frame. His forms are in a much rougher visual style than the nonrepresentational shapes in films by, say, Hans Richter, Oskar Fischinger or the Disney studio. Smith's red and green trapezoids, dyed plaids and painted orbs move with a syncopated choreography like funky, liberated Sol LeWitt permutations.

Smith stated that he amassed his collections of heterogeneous objects--such as paper airplanes, Ukrainian painted eggs and string figures drawn from a surprising variety of global cultures (6)--in order to study and catalogue their structural variations. They also provided subject matter for his work. In the short film Seminole Patchwork Quilt (1965-66), for example, shots featuring the geometric designs of Smith's quilt collection are edited in rapid rhythms that demonstrate the inventive range of the rectangular motifs.

In a segment of his unfinished late film Mahagonny, a 1970-80 project based on the themes and rhythms of Kurt Weill's opera that was screened at the Getty, images of string figures are interspersed with complementary patterned footage of mirrored, kaleidoscopic street scenes and landscapes. Smith was clearly fascinated with the conflation of abstract geometry and mythic narrative evident in the string figures, which engender a suggestive context for the manipulated shots of everyday life.

An early interest in anthropology fueled Smith's fascination with cross-cultural pollination. By 1943, as a precocious researcher in Bellingham, Wash., Smith had made recordings of the Lummi, Native Americans of the Puget Sound region, and catalogued their dialects in a phonetic alphabet learned from the University of Washington's fledgling anthropology department. (7) He later enrolled for a brief time at the University of California at Berkeley, taking a few courses before embarking on his career of independent thinking, collecting and pontificating.

Smith's interest in analytic anthropology, however, melded with his ingrained faith in metaphysics. His father, a watchman for the Pacific American Fisheries, and mother, a teacher on the Lummi Indian reservation, were both theosophists who shared their interest in mysticism with their son. Smith grew to be well read in arcane philosophy and became a follower of Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), the notorious writer and charismatic leader of OTO, a cult devoted to the practice of magic and esoteric ritual.

The systematizing principles of alchemy further infused Smith's thinking. The record jackets of the Anthology feature an etching from a 17th-century compendium on mysticism by the British Rosicrucian Robert Fludd that depicts the hand of God tuning the "Celestial Monochord," the protean, single-string instrument said to have been invented by Pythagoras to unite harmonically the elements of earth, air, fire and water. In Fludd's schema, an overlaid diagram charts the instrument's musical scale, while concentric spheres outline various components of creation and spiritual energy.

Smith provided this stunningly grandiose context for the odd, plainspoken performances brought together on his records. As Greil Marcus puts it in "The Old, Weird America," the central chapter of his book, Invisible Republic, "Printed over the filaments of the etching and its crepuscular Latin explanations were record titles and the names of the blues singers, hillbilly musicians, and gospel chanters Smith was bringing together for the first time. It was as if they had something to do with each other: as if Pythagoras, Fludd, and the likes of Jilson Setters, Ramblin' Thomas, the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers, Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers, and Smith himself were calling on the same gods." (8)

Fraught with haunted visions and stories of primal violence, the Anthology lives up to the mythic framework Smith provided for it. Songs feature gratuitous murders, deep-seated jealousies, self-destructive passions, sexual boasts and oddball confessions. The Anthology's booklet offers Smith's descriptions of the songs' narratives written as deadpan headlines (presaging the titling mode of Jim Shaw's "Thrift Store Paintings"). The plot of the 13th-century ballad "Fatal Flower Garden," for example, is boiled down to "GAUDY WOMAN LURES CHILD FROM PLAYFELLOWS; STABS HIM AS VICTIM DICTATES MESSAGE TO PARENTS." The story line for a raucous variation on "Froggie Went A'Courting" reads "ZOOLOGIC MISCEGENY ACHIEVED IN MOUSE FROG NUPTUALS, RELATIVES APPROVE."

Smith's thematic sequencing downplayed differences among genres and ethnic groups. In fact, the booklet's commentary on the 84 songs completely avoids mention of the performers' race. Smith mischievously reported in a 1968 interview that it took years before fans discovered that blues performer Mississippi John Hurt was not white. Mixing grim goings-on and boundless silliness, the Anthology as a whole conjures an American past of stubborn individuality, eccentric humor and unpredictable violence, insisting at the height of the bland Eisenhower era that, as Marcus put it, "against every assurance to the contrary, America was itself a mystery." (9)

Smith's work stands beside D.H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) and William Carlos Williams's In the American Grain (1925) as an impassioned, darkly lyrical portrait of the national psyche, weaving its themes of betrayal, economic obsolescence and sexual longing into a kind of uberlied. The Anthology can also be seen today as an epic work of appropriation. Following his personal notions about the American spirit and style, Smith subtly sequenced an extraordinary selection of songs, a unique document worthy of close examination in its own right and on its own terms. As a parting shot, the Anthology's booklet features a quotation from the American jurist, Judge Learned Hand, on the topic of plagiarism. For readers today, the statement gives Smith's conceptual enterprise an appropriately proto-Borgesian, proto-postmodern spin:

If by some magic a man who had never known it were to compose a new Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," he would be an "author," and if he copyrighted it, others might not copy that poem, though they might of course copy Keats.

The daunting breadth of Smith's endeavors stymies any simple attempt at synthesis. The symposium demonstrated that difficulty with eight talks, each of which addressed a thin slice of the Smith pie. Film historian William Moritz cleared away some of Smith's self-made legend as an autodidact by chronicling Smith's work with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's 1946-47 "Art and Cinema" program, which involved encounters with California experimental filmmakers Fischinger, Kenneth Anger and the Whitney brothers. Princeton professor P. Adams Sitney, cofounder of New York's Anthology Film Archives, compared Smith's animations to the magic-laden short films of film pioneer Georges Melies. Literary scholar Stephen Fredman traced Smith's affinities with poets Ginsberg, Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer, emphasizing their shared interests in rhythmic sequencing, collage and esoteric lore. Marcus augmented his previous writings on Smith, focusing attention on the Anthology's performers as "strange people telling strange stories," who are themselves even greater enigmas than Harry Smith.

The related concerts confirmed that the Anthology's performances Signify in a way that can't be duplicated. While a relaxed evening at the Getty of Anthology songs rendered by downhome talents such as Geoff Muldaur, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, the Handsome Family and Robert Lockwood had a kind of informal charm, a sprawling event at UCLA's Royce Hall produced by Hal Willner (as a run-through for a forthcoming tribute album) was perhaps too "big name" for its own good. A cavalcade of performers, including Elvis Costello, Beck, Marianne Faithfull, Philip Glass, Todd Rundgren and Richard Thompson, offered more than four hours of interpretations that, for the most part, only enhanced one's appreciation for the original versions. Yet a handful of genuinely oddball performances--by David Johannson, Van Dyke Parks, Eric Mingus, Gavin Friday, Garth & Maud Hudson and David Thomas--might have met Smith's exacting standards for passion and eccentricity.

In his symposium comments, Marcus praised Smith's decision to leave strict historiography to the musicologists and to disseminate his own version of the musical past guided solely by whim and taste, offering no pieties about "folk" authenticity. Marcus proposed that by using early commercial recordings as texts, Smith "suggested to Americans that their culture is their own and they can do what they want with it."

This freewheeling spirit of invention animates all of Smith's endeavors, from the hand-painted and collaged films to the collections of esoterica. In our age of increased specialization, Smith demonstrates the unexpected energy that is generated from the synthesis of disciplines. Stepping outside cultural and academic strictures, he pursued a synchronized, high-colored universe skipping to bebop rhythms and spirited by mountain laments and gospel wails. A cosmic impresario, Harry Smith took on nothing less than the task of illustrating, arranging, producing and distributing the music of the spheres.

(1.) American Magus Harry Smith: A Modern Alchemist, Paola Igliori, ed., New York, Inanout Press, 1996; and Think of the Self Speaking: Harry Smith--Selected Interviews, Rani Singh, ed., Seattle, Elbow/Cityful Press, 1999.

(2.) Record collecting in the 1940s turned out to be of significant archival importance, since so many early recordings with limited pressings were destroyed during World War II to clear warehouses for military supplies. Smith and his collector cohorts were able to buy scores of by-then-rare 1920s 78s from vast warehouse sales at bulk prices.

(3.) Although sharing much of the tone of the previous volumes, Volume Four includes songs recorded after the Depression up to 1940. Its recent issuing was based on a taped copy of Smith's proposed song sequence; his notes for this volume have not been found, but Revenant's accompanying booklet provides a helpful context for the selection.

(4.) Smith's archive, currently held at the Anthology Film Archives in New York, contains many paintings and drawings that have yet to be exhibited.

(5.) Although the films were screened to the Gillespie soundtrack at the Getty, copyright disputes prohibit the live Gillespie recordings from being used on the video compilation of Smith's films currently distributed by the Iota Center, Los Angeles. Oddly, the video version of the films is set to the first Beatles album "Meet the Beatles," following a flip decision made by Smith in his later years.

(6.) Common to many cultures, string figures are representations of mythic narratives or symbols that are made by looping string around one's fingers, cat's-cradle style. For more information, see the Web site of the International String Figure Association at www.isfa.org.

(7.) For a full report on Smith's Lummi recordings, which were given to the University of Washington, see Darrin Daniel, Harry Smith: Fragments of a Northwest Life, Seattle, Elbow Press, 2000, pp. 14-19.

(8.) Greil Marcus, Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, New York, Henry Holt, 1997, p. 93.

(9.) Ibid., p. 96.

"Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the American Vernacular," an interdisciplinary, multimedia symposium, was organized by the Getty Research Institute and held at the Getty Center, Los Angeles, Apr. 20 and 21. The related concert, "Hal Willner's Harry Smith Project," was presented Apr. 25 and 26 at UCLA's Royce Hall.

Michael Duncan is a freelance writer living in Los Angeles.

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