QUEER as FOLK/the HARRY SMITH project..

[KiwiCoromandel]

One wildly eccentric drunk had the clarity of vision to change the course of music forever, writes Grant Smithies....

Drunk, flat broke and strung out on peyote, with an unkempt beard as bristly as a toilet brush, Oregon-born eccentric Harry Smith arrived in New York City by train in 1950. He was 29 years old, a drifter, a drug fiend and an alcoholic, extremely intelligent, but crazy as a snake.

Among his many passions were experimental filmmaking and what is now known as ethno-musicology, and in his luggage, he had hundreds of vintage 78s. Out in California, he had 19,000 more in storage. Within a week of arriving in New York, Smith persuaded Moe Asch from Folkways Records to advance him $200 to support himself while he whittled this huge record collection down to a six-LP, 84-song music compilation he believed would "alter the nation's consciousness".

Astoundingly, it did. When it was released in 1952, Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music permanently changed the way many leading American musicians looked at their own country, and the way they would reinterpret America's musical heritage for future generations. The anthology was packed with country, folk and blues recordings originally released between 1927 and 1932, the artists ranging from familiar performers such as Lightnin' Hopkins, the Carter Family and Blind Lemon Jefferson to obscure characters who popped out of a Tennessee coal mine for a week, made one record, and then disappeared back underground.

What united the chosen songs was their weight, their authority, their almost mystical power. At a time when America was determined to forget the traumas of recent years and surge deliriously into the future, these were songs that invited listeners to dwell on the lessons of the past. There were ballads of love, lust, murder, suicide, and mysterious supernatural forces. There were songs about catastrophic floods, droughts, boll weevil infestations, sin and its inevitable punishment. There were country waltzes, plantation spirituals, blues blowouts, and rambunctious Cajun party tunes, many still freighted with the ghosts of earlier Scottish and Irish jigs and reels.

It was music from the fault line; you could hear the old world colliding with new world; you could feel a mighty cultural rumble as the tectonic plates rubbed against one another. The times they were a changing, certainly, but these stubbornly timeless songs testified to the fact that basic human emotions remained the same down the ages.

Smith had excavated music with sufficient emotional power to speak directly to the human spirit, reinforcing a sense of fundamental kinship between young and old, black and white, urban and rural, rich and poor, male and female, northerner and southerner.

Poet and fellow eccentric Allen Ginsberg called the collection "a historic bomb", and he was right - listening to it today, more than 50 years after it was first released, it still detonates in your consciousness like a grenade. An unfeasibly colourful riot of creaky twangs, impassioned field hollers, hillbilly gospel and coal miners' laments, these songs feel like transmissions from a long-lost America where life veered constantly between tragedy and jubilation and music reflected that fact by being raw, ornery and deeply strange.

It's no wonder these recordings were ransacked for ideas and lyrical fragments by Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, The Byrds, Neil Young, The Band, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, Nick Cave and a thousand others, as well as more recent folk-rock innovators such as Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsome, Gillian Welch and Jeff Tweedy.

The original Anthology was remastered and reissued in 1997, complete with a copy of Smith's hilariously eccentric original notes on each track (eg, "Drunkard's Special" by Coley Jones: "Wife's Logic Fails to Explain Strange Bedfellow to Drunkard"), a CD-rom of visual material, and a 68-page book of essays by a raft of noted scholars and wild-eyed ranters. Buy on sight.

In late 1999, Nick Cave and producer Hal Willner began staging shows in which contemporary artists would cover the Anthology's songs, often performing against a backdrop created from Smith's experimental movies.

A document of those shows is now upon us. Packaged in a mock-up of the original Anthology box, The Harry Smith Project contains two CDs of live performances and two DVDs of concert footage, plus three of Smith's short films and an excellent doco called The Old, Weird America. Musically, not everything succeeds, but the pieces that do are treasures. Van Dyke Parks and the Mondrian String Quartet turn in an arrestingly lovely take on traditional tune "Sail Away Lady", and Wilco offer up an appropriately stoic reading of Richard Rabbit Brown's "James Alley Blues". Canadian singer Mary Margaret O'Hara sounds every bit as timelessly weird as anyone on the original Anthology, and Lou Reed, Sonic Youth, Nick Cave and Pere Ubu's David Thomas also rise above mere homage and push their chosen songs down unexpected side-roads.

But for all this new collection's strengths, it's nowhere near as good as Smith's original 1952 collection. How could it be? The Anthology of American Folk Music is a life-changing compilation, and one of the founding documents of popular music. We should give thanks to musical magpie Harry Smith, who died destitute in 1991 in New York City, living out his last few weeks in the notorious Chelsea Hotel.

VARIOUS ARTISTS

Anthology Of American Folk Music (Smithsonian/Elite)

Transmissions from a long-lost America...

THE HARRY SMITH PROJECT

Anthology of American Folk Music Revisited (Shock)...

source:stuff/grant smithies

images:www.nndb.com:HARRY SMITH...."One wildly eccentric drunk had the clarity of vision to change the course of music forever"