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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