A Journal Concerning Todd Haynes' Dylan Film (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} im_not_there) wrote,@ 2007-09-17 00:14:00 |
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Dylan and the Anthology of American Folk Music
Of course, Rock & Roll was a major influence in the fifties with previously mentioned Little Richard making his mark on a young Bob Zimmerman. But there was an equally strong current permeating the American consciousness in the form of folk music. In the postwar imagination, folk music was an authentic American expression with credentials further honed in the struggles of the Dust Bowl and Depression. It was also seen by young people as an alternative to the increasing commercialization of popular culture.
The Anthology of American Folk Music was released in 1952 on Folkways Records. This six LP set contained 84 songs from 1927-1932 that were originally released on 78s. While folk troubadours like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger were popular and influential by the early 1950s, the Anthology is acknowledged as one of the major reasons for the surge in the popularity of folk music with the generation born during and just after the war. The set of albums was just the type of thing that libraries and schools would add to their collections, introducing these songs to an audience that would never have heard them otherwise. Any newly minted folk singer would memorize the Anthology as the core of their repertoire. Bob Dylan covered six of the songs on the Anthology and borrowed from many more.
The collection and presentation of the Anthology seemed so authoritative and canonical - one can feel the earnest musicologist on his way to a Ph.D., weighing every track for its importance and authentically in consideration for inclusion. And yet that is not the case at all. It is the quirky vision of one particular man with perhaps the most esoteric credentials any American has ever had. Harry Smith was the definition of the bohemian artist. He was an experimental filmmaker, painter, collector, ethnographer, occultist, (he often claimed his father was Aleister Crowley with whom his mother had an affair) who happened to collect old 78s (as well as paper airplanes, Ukrainian Easter Eggs and Seminole Quilts.)
In the early days of marketing records, genres like hillbilly or old time and race records were usually sold regionally, so many of seminal country and blues records that would later influence rock and roll were not known outside what the record companies considered their proper demographic. It was unlikely that city kids would hear country music or white teenagers would hear the blues. 78s were also fragile, and by the 1940s, when Harry Smith was collecting, they were being replaced by the newer format of LP records. So Smith was prescient in claiming what many people considered obsolete or worthless from the trash. His choice of recordings ~ popular tunes arranged by theme rather than geography, chronology or ethnicity as they would have been in most other collections ~ and their idiosyncratic liner notes make the Anthology a uniquely personal work that nevertheless has had universal appeal. He was awarded a honorary Grammy Award in 1991 and said in acceptance, "I'm glad to say my dreams came true. I saw America changed by music."
Of course, Rock & Roll was a major influence in the fifties with previously mentioned Little Richard making his mark on a young Bob Zimmerman. But there was an equally strong current permeating the American consciousness in the form of folk music. In the postwar imagination, folk music was an authentic American expression with credentials further honed in the struggles of the Dust Bowl and Depression. It was also seen by young people as an alternative to the increasing commercialization of popular culture.
The Anthology of American Folk Music was released in 1952 on Folkways Records. This six LP set contained 84 songs from 1927-1932 that were originally released on 78s. While folk troubadours like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger were popular and influential by the early 1950s, the Anthology is acknowledged as one of the major reasons for the surge in the popularity of folk music with the generation born during and just after the war. The set of albums was just the type of thing that libraries and schools would add to their collections, introducing these songs to an audience that would never have heard them otherwise. Any newly minted folk singer would memorize the Anthology as the core of their repertoire. Bob Dylan covered six of the songs on the Anthology and borrowed from many more.
The collection and presentation of the Anthology seemed so authoritative and canonical - one can feel the earnest musicologist on his way to a Ph.D., weighing every track for its importance and authentically in consideration for inclusion. And yet that is not the case at all. It is the quirky vision of one particular man with perhaps the most esoteric credentials any American has ever had. Harry Smith was the definition of the bohemian artist. He was an experimental filmmaker, painter, collector, ethnographer, occultist, (he often claimed his father was Aleister Crowley with whom his mother had an affair) who happened to collect old 78s (as well as paper airplanes, Ukrainian Easter Eggs and Seminole Quilts.)
In the early days of marketing records, genres like hillbilly or old time and race records were usually sold regionally, so many of seminal country and blues records that would later influence rock and roll were not known outside what the record companies considered their proper demographic. It was unlikely that city kids would hear country music or white teenagers would hear the blues. 78s were also fragile, and by the 1940s, when Harry Smith was collecting, they were being replaced by the newer format of LP records. So Smith was prescient in claiming what many people considered obsolete or worthless from the trash. His choice of recordings ~ popular tunes arranged by theme rather than geography, chronology or ethnicity as they would have been in most other collections ~ and their idiosyncratic liner notes make the Anthology a uniquely personal work that nevertheless has had universal appeal. He was awarded a honorary Grammy Award in 1991 and said in acceptance, "I'm glad to say my dreams came true. I saw America changed by music."
