Collecting, Collage, and Alchemy: The Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music as Art and Cultural Intervention

In 1952 the Folkways record label released a set of three double-LP collections titled the Anthology of American Folk Music. Housed in obscure packaging seemingly designed to conceal as much as document, the set collected 84 commercially-released recordings from the 1920s and 1930s covering a variety of styles and genres that, in the streamlined modern 1950s, already sounded as though they came from a distant past despite being just a generation removed from their recording. The set was compiled by one Harry Smith, an experimental filmmaker and visionary painter with an interest in anthropology, an extensive knowledge of mysticism, and a passion for collecting various types of cultural artifacts. The Anthology coalesced out of these interests, bringing together art, music, philosophy, and collecting into a work that was both a document and a provocation, a statement about the past and a suggestion about how to remake the present in the interests of the future.

The collection's influence on American music and culture has been widely hailed. The set, and the music and worldview it contained, would spread like a subterranean virus during the decade, serving as a bible for the late-1950s "folk revival," and later as a spur for countercultural musical developments of the 1960s. In 1991, shortly before his death, Smith received a lifetime Grammy award in honor of its enduring influence, which continues in the early years of the new millennium through a late-1990s compact disc reissue and a revived popular appreciation for folk music.

In this article, I argue that the continuing influence of the Anthology is due to its being much more than a wonderful collection of songs: It is also in itself a work of art, an artistic collage that draws on alchemical organizational principles, transmuting fragmentary pieces of culture to higher levels of conceptual meaning; in so doing, it provides a set of strategies for working with cultural materials that are particularly postmodern in their implications. In the pages that follow I will tease out these various threads, focusing especially on the role of collecting, the aesthetic strategies of collage, and the philosophy of alchemy that motivated Smith's work. Smith has been referred to as an "American magus" (Igliori 1996) for this mix of influences, with the stress usually on the first half of that phrase; here, however, I would like to consider the second.

Harry Smith

It is no exaggeration to suggest that Smith (1923-1991) should be considered one of the most important underground instigators in American culture and art during the twentieth century. An almost archetypal Bohemian trickster figure, Smith was a key influence on a whole range of creative activities, even as his contrarian temperament and self-destructive tendencies often kept him from receiving broader public notice.

In the visual arts, he is most known for his paintings and films. His work spanned many of the major styles in twentieth century art, including geometric formalism, collage, abstraction, conceptual art, and Surrealism, though given his independent nature he always distanced himself from any particular movement. As a filmmaker he developed several key approaches to avant-garde filmmaking, including techniques for painting directly on film stock, and the concept of "collage films" made up of found images and objects. He also invented a number of projection techniques that were later picked up in the 1960s as part of the psychedelic light shows that would accompany rock concerts.

Smith was an amateur anthropologist and a musicologist, especially interested in Native cultures; among other things, he was the first white man allowed to participate in and record the Kiowa Indian peyote ceremonies, parts of which he edited and annotated for release on the Folkways label in 1975. He was also an expert in philosophical arcana, especially interested in lost and marginalized mystical schools in the Western tradition, such as the esoteric Jewish Kabbalah and hermetic alchemy. Smith's knowledge in these areas was well-respected in various circles: He was an honorary member of various occult groups, and toward the end of his life in...