Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Monday, April 19, 2010
Harry Smith and the Anthology of American Folk Music
Arguably the most influential illegal bootleg in music history, the Anthology of American Folk Music is a three volume, six album collection of folk, blues and country music recorded from 1926-1932 and issued by Moses Asch's Folkways record label in 1952. The Anthology was compiled by Harry Smith, an eccentric filmmaker and ethnomusicologist who had been collecting old records in New York City since 1940. Smith divided the songs into three categories: ballads, social music and songs, and wrote elaborate liner notes for each song, strange synopses that read like headlines from the strangest newspaper in the world. For example, Chubby Parker's "King Kong Kitchie Ki-Me-O", about a mouse who marries a frog, has the note, "Zoologic Miscegeny Achieved Mouse Frog Nuptials, Relatives Approve". Because the songs were all commercial recordings (as opposed to field recordings), and neither Smith nor Moses Asch received permission to use the songs, the collection was technically an illegal bootleg.
The influence that this collection had is immense. The Anthology was an enormous part of the folk music revival, and reintroduced the works of many seminal folk musicians, leading folk scholars and enthusiasts to seek out, and in many cases, find the original performers. Key folk performers of the 1960s like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Dave van Ronk studied the Anthology and learned and performed the songs from it. There is little doubt that without the Anthology, our collection might not even exist, and our collection includes copies of many of the original recordings that Smith used in compiling this groundbreaking work.
There was supposed to be a fourth volume of the Anthology, but Smith never finished it before his death in 1991. In 2000, it was released, based on the work that Smith had done. Unlike the rest of the Anthology, this collection includes songs recorded after the Great Depression's effect on the recording industry, and includes songs from as late as the 1940.
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The Folk Revival
Without the Folk Revival of the 1950s and 1960s, there's a decent chance that you would not be reading this blog right now. It's possible that without the increased attention to folk music that came about, starting with the work of archivists and field recorders like Alan Lomax, Harry Smith and Moses Asch of Folkways Records, our collection would not be as special as it is.
The revival began with the popularity of the Weavers, a folk group formed in the late 1940s and featuring the talents of Pete Seeger and Lee Hays, former members of the Almanac Singers, which included Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston. In 1950, The Weavers had a hit with Lead Belly's "Goodnight Irene, and before they were dropped by the Decca label for their left leaning politics (this was during the Red Scare and McCarthyism) they had other million-selling singles such as "So Long, It's Been Good To Know You" and "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine". The folk scene was temporarily driven underground, to college towns and coffee shops in places like Greenwich Village.
In the 1950s, a few folk performers such as Odetta and Harry Belafonte had crossover success, but the flourishing of the revival began with the Kingston Trio, who were directly inspired by the Weavers, and in 1958 had a smash hit with "Tom Dooley", a song that had been performed at Lead Belly's funeral.
Over the next few years, performers such as Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, the trio of Peter, Paul and Mary, Judy Collins, Phil Ochs and Tom Paxton all rose to prominence performing folk music. Folk music became associated with the Civil Rights movement, with several folk artists performing at Martin Luther King's famous March on Washington in 1963. Eventually, rock music would consume folk music, an event symbolized by Bob Dylan's playing electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival, and famously being called "Judas" at a 1966 show in Manchester, England.
Still, the folk revival had an enormous effect on the music and culture writ large, and has helped to ensure that folk music has remained prominent ever since.
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman) is arguably the most famous folk singer of all time, even though his status as a "folk singer" is up for debate. Dylan's first album, Bob Dylan, consisted of Dylan's versions of several folk songs, including "House of the Rising Sun" and "Man of Constant Sorrow", as well as one original composition, his tribute to Woody Guthrie, "Song To Woody", sold poorly when it was released in 1962. His breakthrough came with his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, which included his first major hit, "Blowin' In The Wind". While folk music contributed a lot to Dylan's work, it was not until the 1990s when Dylan recorded another album of traditional music, 1992's Good As I Been To You and 1993's World Gone Wrong.
Originally from Hibbing, Minnesota, Dylan moved to Greenwich Village, and became part of the folk revival of the early 1960s. He became associated with major folk stars like Joan Baez, who he toured with, and Peter, Paul and Mary, who he shared a manager with, and who first made "Blowin' In The Wind" a hit. In 1965, Dylan stunned the crowd at the Newport Folk Festival (he had been a hit at the 1963 and 1964 festivals) by playing rock music on an electric guitar, a move that was seen as a betrayal of the folk music community and ideals by many in the crowd.
Bob Dylan's version of "Blood in My Eyes", originally performed by the Mississippi Sheiks.
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Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter
In 1933, John Lomax and his son Alan, traveling through the South to collect folk songs,met a prisoner in Louisiana's Angola Prison Farm named Huddie Ledbetter. Ledbetter had arrived in prison in 1930 for attempted homicide, and it had not been his first time behind bars. In 1915, Ledbetter had been sentenced to a chain gang. He escaped, but three years later, in January of 1918, he was imprisoned in Texas for killing one of his relatives in a fight over a woman. He was released in 1925, after writing a song for the governor petitioning for his own release. This meeting of the "ballad hunter" and his teenage son would become legendary, as it would introduce the world to the folk icon known as Lead Belly.
Lead Belly was released from prison a year after first recording for Lomax. At the time, Lead Belly and Lomax believed that the release was the result of another song petitioning another governor for leniency, this time as a record with a b-side of Lead Belly's iconic "Goodnight Irene", but it has since been shown that Lead Belly was scheduled for release due to time served and good behavior. Initially unable to find work upon his parole, he became Lomax's driver and assistant as Lomax continued seeking out and recording traditional folk music for the Library of Congress. When he went to New York with Lomax, the press learned of his story, and he became a sensation. Time Magazine even did a newsreel about the "singing convict" for their News On the March series.
Lead Belly would eventually become a fixture of the New York folk scene, appearing on radio shows hosted by Alan Lomax and Nicholas Ray (who would gone on to direct Rebel Without A Cause"), recording for Columbia, RCA, the Library of Congress, Capitol Records and Moses Asch, who would go on to found the Folkways label. Famous for his enormous 12-string guitar, Lead Belly either wrote or helped to popularize many of the songs that became folk standards, such as "Midnight Special", "Goodnight Irene", "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?", "Black Betty", "Cotton Fields" and "Gallis Pole".
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Woody Guthrie
Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, better known as Woody, is best known today as the writer of "This Land Is Your Land", but his legacy and importance to the history of American music, and folk music in particular, is much greater than one song. Born in Oklahoma in 1912, Guthrie is forever identified with the Dust Bowl disaster that devastated the Midwest in the 1930s. Like so many other Midwesterners, the disaster led Guthrie to move to California in search of work.
In California, he eventually found success as a radio performer in Los Angeles, signing traditional folk songs as well as his own original compositions, many of which highlighted the plight of the "Okies"and other dispossessed peoples. Songs like "Dust Bowl Blues", "Do Re Mi", "Pretty Boy Floyd" (in which he warned that some people rob with a gun while others rob with a fountain pen captured the sentiments felt by many people who had been evicted from their homes by the banks during the Great Depression) and "Blowin' Down The Road" made up
his first commercial recording, Dust Bowl Ballads, issued in 1940 and consisting largely of songs he debuted on his radio program.
Besides his performances on his radio show, Guthrie, a life-long supporter of left wing causes, began writing a column for the Communist newspaper, The Daily Worker. This column, called "Woody Sez" was not expressly political in nature, but focused on Guthrie's experiences and observations. However, with the outbreak of World War II and the Soviet Union's non-aggression pact with Hitler's Germany, the column led to him losing his radio show and not being able to find work in Los Angeles.
Guthrie moved to New York, where he recorded the Dust Bowl Ballads album, as well as a series of recordings with Alan Lomax, both of songs and oral histories. He got work hosting radio shows in New York, and in 1940 he wrote his most famous song, "This Land Is Your Land" a response to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America". Like virtually all of Guthrie's songs, he only composed the words, while taking the music from traditional folk songs. In the case of 'This Land Is Your Land", the melody was taken from The Carter Family's gospel song "Little Darling, Pal of Mine", also known as "Oh My Loving Brother". In 1941, Guthrie grew tired of New York and moved to the Pacific Northwest, although he wound up returning to New York shortly thereafter to join the Almanac Singers folk group founded by Pete Seeger, and based in Greenwich Village. In 1944, Guthrie began recording for Moses Asch's Folkway Records, eventually recording hundreds of songs for the label. He also finished his autobiography, Bound For Glory, which became a very influential book, particularly on a young Bob Dylan.
In 1952, Guthrie was diagnosed with Huntington's disease, which his mother had died of, and by 1956 his condition had declined to the point where he was committed first to they Greystrone Park Psychiatric Hospital and then the Brooklyn State Hospital, where he remained for the rest of his life. While there, he was visited by the young Dylan, who had traveled to New York from Minnesota with the express intent of meeting his "last hero", Guthrie. As the folk revival that he had helped to foster took shape, he lay slowly dying, finally passing away in 1967.
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