When I was in the Kerrville new folk contest in 2016 and 2017 ( I won in 2017 with a song Christgau called jaw dropping and another Greil wrote kindly about in one is his top tens) I met a lot of young writers. I would ask if they even knew or had heard about the anthology and they hadn’t. I couldn’t help myself but yell at them something I learned from Shulmit Ran in college!:”You must know the literature”. I bet none of them listened to me.
I learned about the Anthology from Peter Stampfel well before I became a close friend of him and his family.
A couple of thoughts
1. The phrase “Old weird America” is perfect but is also bleeding obvious. The recordings and the songs are really really strange, made even stranger by Harry Smiith’s comments in the original liner note.
2. What’s even weirder is a lot of the 78s that Harry Smith bootlegged into the anthology were made by furniture companies who made these records so folks had something to play on the gramophones they were selling (eg Brunswick-Balke-Collender Company which started Brunswick Records, Wisconsin Chair Company which started Paramount Records). And people bought them to entertain themselves in their old weird American homes, and had bought enough of them so that later they could be discovered in basements and attics and garage sales and flea markets to be recovered by the likes of Harry Smith, Joe Bussard, Robert Crumb and others so that they could be heard again, hitting Greenwich Village music scene in the early fifties like a nuclear device.
3. IMHO If you want to learn to write songs, any kind of song, you really need to start here. I’d go farther and say that one really can’t write songs without knowing either these songs or songs by someone like Dylan or Guthrie or Big Bill Broonzy who knew that music in their bones. I’ll bet even Gershwin heard some these original 78s. Maybe even Jerome Kern.
Anyway these recordings are fantastic, weird and wonderful, and foundational.
Harry Smith said he was looking for ‘odd’ recordings—idiosyncratic versions of traditional or commonplace songs. A version of, say, ‘Love Henry’ or ‘The Titanic’ unlike that anyone else would make. He constructed a version of America where people who thought they knew their neighbors could find out they didn’t.
Exactly. And finding this is out terrifies a lot of folks, and a major motivator behind tribalism.
In the arts, certainly in rock and roll, we celebrate the iconoclast…the contrarian. Having spent most of life at the University of Chicago I have been taught how to be an iconoclast.
What I wasn’t taught, and what I’ve come to understand, is most people HATE iconoclasts.
"Old, weird," you mean? It would piss me off, too, if I thought that Marcus saw it that way (i.e., as finished). But no one is as alert as he is to the traces and survivals of it in the present! That's his whole unifying theme. That something older and weirder is always humming below the surface...
Thanks for this. I still think it's a toss up between Joe Namath and Johnny Unitas for best QB of all time. Warren Moon or Doug Flutie if you count the ones who played in Canada as well as the NFL/AFL and the league the Browns were originally in, which I can't remember right now. Have a great rest of the summer.
That’s shocking news about Dave Marsh. Can’t see any reported health issues on line, I assume this is something he wishes to keep private.
So sorry to hear about Dave Marsh's health. "Can no longer communicate" is a lot to take in.
My reflections on the Smith anthology.
When I was in the Kerrville new folk contest in 2016 and 2017 ( I won in 2017 with a song Christgau called jaw dropping and another Greil wrote kindly about in one is his top tens) I met a lot of young writers. I would ask if they even knew or had heard about the anthology and they hadn’t. I couldn’t help myself but yell at them something I learned from Shulmit Ran in college!:”You must know the literature”. I bet none of them listened to me.
I learned about the Anthology from Peter Stampfel well before I became a close friend of him and his family.
A couple of thoughts
1. The phrase “Old weird America” is perfect but is also bleeding obvious. The recordings and the songs are really really strange, made even stranger by Harry Smiith’s comments in the original liner note.
2. What’s even weirder is a lot of the 78s that Harry Smith bootlegged into the anthology were made by furniture companies who made these records so folks had something to play on the gramophones they were selling (eg Brunswick-Balke-Collender Company which started Brunswick Records, Wisconsin Chair Company which started Paramount Records). And people bought them to entertain themselves in their old weird American homes, and had bought enough of them so that later they could be discovered in basements and attics and garage sales and flea markets to be recovered by the likes of Harry Smith, Joe Bussard, Robert Crumb and others so that they could be heard again, hitting Greenwich Village music scene in the early fifties like a nuclear device.
3. IMHO If you want to learn to write songs, any kind of song, you really need to start here. I’d go farther and say that one really can’t write songs without knowing either these songs or songs by someone like Dylan or Guthrie or Big Bill Broonzy who knew that music in their bones. I’ll bet even Gershwin heard some these original 78s. Maybe even Jerome Kern.
Anyway these recordings are fantastic, weird and wonderful, and foundational.
Hope anything I wrote here is helpful to someone.
Love, Rich
Harry Smith said he was looking for ‘odd’ recordings—idiosyncratic versions of traditional or commonplace songs. A version of, say, ‘Love Henry’ or ‘The Titanic’ unlike that anyone else would make. He constructed a version of America where people who thought they knew their neighbors could find out they didn’t.
Exactly. And finding this is out terrifies a lot of folks, and a major motivator behind tribalism.
In the arts, certainly in rock and roll, we celebrate the iconoclast…the contrarian. Having spent most of life at the University of Chicago I have been taught how to be an iconoclast.
What I wasn’t taught, and what I’ve come to understand, is most people HATE iconoclasts.
More fool them.
"Old, weird," you mean? It would piss me off, too, if I thought that Marcus saw it that way (i.e., as finished). But no one is as alert as he is to the traces and survivals of it in the present! That's his whole unifying theme. That something older and weirder is always humming below the surface...
Thanks for this. I still think it's a toss up between Joe Namath and Johnny Unitas for best QB of all time. Warren Moon or Doug Flutie if you count the ones who played in Canada as well as the NFL/AFL and the league the Browns were originally in, which I can't remember right now. Have a great rest of the summer.
Dear Mr. Marcus,
Any thoughts on your appearance in John Tottenham’s novel Service?
I haven’t been called that since second grade, which will give you an idea of the writer’s sense of humor.
.
Thank you, Greil.
Charlie Brown: "I could have been a hero. Instead I'm the GOAT" Prescient.