The film The Old, Weird America: Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (2006) is structured around a mix of live performances (by contemporary musicians), past and recent interviews, and footage of Harry Smith (1923-1991) and his world. More than a biography of Harry Smith, the concert footage of the contemporary performances provides a fresh “funktitude,” as David Johansen might say, toward the selections in the original 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music. Greil Marcus, who gives us a lovely description of all six volumes as a kind of journey through the American psyche, also says “Harry was looking for idiosyncratic performances of standard songs.” Indeed, the better performers, I thought, really made the songs their own.
A few standouts include Lou Reed’s black leather jacket distorted electric guitar version of “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean.” He seems to have returned from the grave just to make this request. After Kate and Anna McGarrigle sing “Ommie Wise” Elvis Costello performs an original second part. This is his musing on the fate of murderous John Lewis. Along with raising a moral issue, it includes fine lines like “Her name was Ommie / She was plane, she was homely / And destined for grief.” Also, Bob Neuwirth, in a rhinestone cowboy type jacket, banjo picking, sings Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground” accompanied by none other than violinist-singer Eliza Carthy (Martin Carthy’s talented daughter).
Many of the interviews are insightful, sentimental, and eloquent. Bob Neuwirth says that Harry Smith was one of the few people he had ever met whom he would truly describe as an eccentric. And, concerning the songs on the Anthology, Elvis Costello reminds us that many of the songwriters and singers were just describing what was going around them in their lives at the time. Also, an anonymous elderly woman, in some black and white footage, comments that “these songs, two or three hundred years ago, were considered pop songs.”Allen Ginsberg, from past interviews, has some entertaining anecdotes and strong sentiments. He bursts into tears at one point after mentioning Harry Smith's death. Ever peripatetic and impecunious, apparently Smith came to live with Ginsburg in his New York City apartment in the mid-eighties. With a smile, Ginsburg relates that he later sent him to The Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where he remained for four years as "resident philosopher."
Amidst all this the film provides other information about Harry Smith’s life. For instance, he lived on 5 ½ Panoramic Way back in his Berkeley days (right in my current neighborhood). I also found the following in the Harry Smith Archives on-line:
“Smith studied anthropology at the University of Washington for five semesters between 1943 and 1944. After a weekend visit to Berkeley, during which he attended a Woody Guthrie concert, met members of San Francisco's bohemian community of artists and intellectuals, and experimented with marijuana for the first time, Smith decided that the type of intellectual stimulation he was seeking was unavailable in his student life.”
He was a filmmaker, musician, painter, mystic, and string collector. Harry Smith explains that as a record collector, leading to the Anthology, he would travel to cities and get his records on the cheap by finding stores going out of business (as an aside, many old vinyl records were lost in the 1930s because they were melted down for WWII efforts). Early on as a filmmaker he would paint directly on each piece of film to create his abstract animation.
There is also footage from 1991 when, after receiving a Chairman's Merit Award at the Grammy Awards ceremony for his contribution to American Folk Music, he proclaimed, "I'm glad to say my dreams came true. I saw America changed by music." Though not mentioned in the film, I read that in the same year “Smith died, singing in Paola Igliori’s arms, in Room 328 at the Hotel Chelsea in New York City."
