Harry Smith (1923–91)
Harry Smith, the visual artist, experimental filmmaker, record collector, bohemian, mystic and largely self-taught student of anthropology, was born 101 years ago.
Smith was an important figure in the Beat Generation scene in New York City. Besides his films, Smith is widely known for his influential Anthology of American Folk Music, drawn from his extensive collection of out-of-print commercial 78 rpm recordings.
Throughout his life Smith was an inveterate collector. In addition to records, he collected artifacts that included string figures, paper airplanes, Seminole textiles and Ukrainian Easter eggs.
Born in Portland, Oregon, Smith spent his earliest years in Washington state in the area between Seattle and Bellingham. As a child, he lived for a time with his family in Anacortes, Washington, a town on Fidalgo Island, where the Swinomish Indian reservation is located. He attended high school in nearby Bellingham.
Smith’s parents, who didn’t get along, lived in separate houses — meeting only at dinner time. Although poor, they gave their son an artistic education, including 10 years of drawing and painting lessons. For a time, it is said, they even ran an art school in their house.
Smith was a voracious reader and he recalled his father bringing him a copy of Carl Sandburg’s folksong anthology, American Songbag. “We were considered some kind of ‘low’ family,” Smith once said, “despite my mother’s feeling that she was [an incarnation of] the Czarina of Russia.”
Physically, Smith was undersized and had a curvature of the spine, which kept him from being drafted. During World War II, he took a job as a mechanic working nights on the construction of the tight, hard-to-reach interior of Boeing bomber planes, for which his short stature suited him.
Smith used the money he made from his job to buy blues records. It also enabled him to formally study anthropology at the University of Washington in Seattle for five semesters between 1942 and the fall of 1944.
In 1945, he moved to San Francisco with the intention of studying anthropology at the University of California in Berkeley. But classroom learning wasn’t his thing. (He attended some lectures but never registered.) He spent most of his time doing what amounted to field research in the city’s burgeoning Beat poetry cafes and in jazz clubs where Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker regularly played.
He lived in a minute apartment in the Fillmore neighborhood, then predominantly African American, and indulged what would be two insatiable lifelong appetites: one, for mood-altering substances (alcohol and a rainbow of perception-changing drugs), and the other for the bulk collecting of objects — books, music recordings, artworks (for him a spacious, nonhierarchical category), antique tools, tarot cards, textiles, toys, used bandages found at tattoo shops, and a Himalaya of newspaper and magazine clippings.
In San Francisco he was doing a lot of painting: smoothly geometric Kandinsky-ish, mandalalike compositions, as well as looser, brushier work in which the individual strokes were synced to the notes and chords in jazz recordings. And he used this gestural mode to create his first animated abstractions, painted directly on film stock, which was then edited and projected.
The earliest surviving example of this “action painting,” “Film №1: A Strange Dream” (circa 1946–48), is in the show — it’s an eyepopper — as are a few more abstractions from the San Francisco years. They’re tip-of-the-iceberg evidence of the riches Smith was producing at the time. But they also hint at what’s been lost.
Chronically indigent and often high, Smith was careless with his art and collections. When he couldn’t pay rent he’d be out on the street, his possessions with him, up for grabs. He’d sometimes destroy things in a rage. So, materially speaking, there’s now relatively little output to see. Three beautiful “jazz paintings” exist only as lightbox transparencies made from slides of originals lost who knows when.
He concentrated on American Indians, making numerous field trips to document the music and customs of the Lummi, whom he had gotten know through his mother’s work with them. When the war ended, Smith, then 22, moved to the Bay Area of San Francisco, then home to a lively bohemian folk music and jazz scene.
As a collector of blues records, he had already been corresponding with the noted blues record aficionado, James McKune. He now also began seriously collecting old hillbilly music records from junk dealers and stores which were going out of business and even appeared as a guest on a folk music radio show hosted by Jack Spicer, the poet.
Smith was especially drawn to bebop, a new jazz form which had originated during impromptu jam sessions before and after paid performances. He went to after hours clubs where Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker could be heard in San Francisco.
At this time, he painted several ambitious jazz-inspired abstract paintings (since destroyed) and began making animated avant garde films featuring patterns that he painted directly on the film stock and which were intended to be shown to the accompaniment of bebop music.
In 1950, Smith received a Guggenheim grant to complete an abstract film, which enabled him first to visit and later move to New York City. He arranged for his collections, including his records, to be shipped to the East Coast. He said that “one reason he moved to New York was to study the Cabala. And, ‘I wanted to hear Thelonious Monk play’.”
When his grant money ran out, he brought what he termed “the cream of the crop” of his record collection to Moe Asch, president of Folkways Records, with the idea of selling it.
Instead, Asch proposed that the 27-year-old Smith use the material to edit a multi-volume anthology of American folk music in long playing format — then a newly developed, cutting edge medium — and he provided space and equipment in his office for Smith to work in.
The recording engineer on the project was Péter Bartók, son of the renowned composer and folklorist. The resultant Folkways anthology, issued in 1952 under the title, American Folk Music, was a compilation of recordings of folk music issued on hillbilly and race records that had previously been released commercially on 78 rpm.
“Had he never done anything with his life but this Anthology, Harry Smith would still have borne the mark of genius across his forehead. I’d match the Anthology up against any other single compendium of important information ever assembled. Dead Sea Scrolls? Nah. I’ll take the Anthology.” — John Fahey
These early recordings featured the “golden age” of the commercial country music industry between 1927 and 1932. When the Depression halted folk music sales, many of the artists went into obscurity. Originally issued as budget discs marketed to rural audiences, the records had long been known, collected and occasionally reissued by folklorists and aficionados.
But this was the first time such a large compilation was made available to affluent, non-specialist urban dwellers. LP discs could hold much more material than the old three-minute 78s and had greater fidelity and far less surface noise. The Anthology was packaged as a set of three, boxed albums. Each box front had a different color: red, blue, or green — in Smith’s schema, representing the alchemical elements.
Priced at $25.00 ($216.00 in 2012) per two-disc set, they were a luxury item.
A fourth album, comprising topical songs from the Depression era, was originally planned by Asch and his long-time assistant, Marian Distler. It was never completed by Smith. It was issued in 2000, nine years after Smith’s death in CD format by Revenant Records with a 95-page booklet of tribute essays to Smith.
The music on Smith’s anthology was performed by such artists as Clarence Ashley, Dock Boggs, The Carter Family, Sleepy John Estes, Mississippi John Hurt, Dick Justice, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Buell Kazee and Bascom Lamar Lunsford.
It had a huge impact on the folk and blues revivals of the 1950s and 60s. The songs were covered by my artists including The New Lost City Ramblers, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.
Rock critic Greil Marcus, in his liner-note essay for the 1997 Smithsonian reissue, quoted musician Dave van Ronk’s avowal that “We all knew every word of every song on it, including the ones we hated.”
In addition to compiling the Folkways anthology, Smith was also instrumental in getting Folkways to produce (on its Broadside label) the The Fugs First Album (1965), now considered the first “folk rock” album.
A regular visitor to the Peace Eye bookstore, in Manhattan’s East Village on 10th St. between Avenues B and Ave C, founded in 1965 by poet Ed Sanders, Smith had advised Sanders which books about Native American studies the store ought to stock. When Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg formed the Fugs, they rehearsed at Peace Eye. “Thanks to Harry,” writes Sanders, “the band was able to record an album within weeks of forming.”
Peter Stampfel recalls that, as the album’s editor and producer, “Harry’s contribution to the proceedings were his presence, inspiration and best of all, smashing a wine bottle against the wall while we were recording ‘Nothing.’”
In New York, he also created his most complex and inventive films, none of them, strictly speaking, abstract. “Film №11: Mirror Animations,” made around 1957, adheres to the “jazz painting” model of aligning music and visuals. The music in this case is Thelonious Monk’s “Misterioso,” but the images now include Buddhist figures and Kabbalistic emblems.
For “Film №12: Heaven and Earth Magic Feature,” Smith supplied his own score of everyday noises: dogs barking, babies crying, wind blowing, glass breaking. He also proposed a story line — a woman with a toothache goes to a dentist, gets injected with some kind of drug and ascends to heaven — which is enacted by figures clipped from Victorian-era print sources.
It’s certainly there in the magnum opus “Film №18: Mahagonny,” (1970–80). The score is a full two-hours-plus recording of the Kurt Weill-Bertolt Brecht opera “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.” And the visuals, projected on four square contiguous screens, are a collage of color films Smith shot in Manhattan in the 1970s: on its streets, in the Chelsea Hotel and in Central Park. A mathematically calculated visual puzzle, it’s also a record of a time and place, filtered through Smith’s favored themes: outsider-insider culture, embodied in figures from the city’s avant-garde (Ginsberg and Patti Smith make appearances); material accumulation (tabletop arrangements of food, liquor bottles and drugs); and some promise of transcendence, in this case through Nature (childhood: he keeps going back there). In the 1970s, New York was in trouble, and so was Smith. Years of alcohol and drug intake were catching up. “A stoned, drunken, hunched-over demonically creative gnome” is how his New York psychiatrist described him. Penniless and in failing health, he was crashing with friends who passed him on to other friends. At one point he ended up in a Bowery flophouse. (This phase of his life — indeed his entire life — is empathetically chronicled in John Szwed’s indispensable new biography, “Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith.”)
Harry Smith lived at the Hotel Chelsea on West 23rd Street in New York City from 1968 to 1975, after which he was “sometimes ‘stranded’ at hotels where he would owe so much money he couldn’t leave, and he was too famous just to be thrown out.”
This was the case at the Breslin Hotel at 28th and Broadway, where Smith lived until 1985, when his friend, poet Allen Ginsberg, took him into his home on East 12th Street.
While living with Ginsberg, Smith designed the cover for two of Ginsberg’s books, White Shroud and Collected Poems, as well as continuing to work on his own films and to record ambient sounds. By this time, Smith was suffering from severe health and dental problems, as well as alcohol addiction. He proved a difficult guest.
But he never stopped working, which meant collecting: He carried a tape recorder, always turned on. And there were late upbeat moments. In 1988 he was invited to teach at Naropa Institute (now Naropa University) in Boulder, Colo., a Buddhist-inspired college, where he was treasured and cosseted. In 1991, he was awarded a special Grammy for the “Anthology” and flew to New York, five kittens in tow, to accept it. He wore a rented tuxedo. No one would have guessed that by this point he was surviving entirely on instant mashed potatoes, NyQuil and cigarettes and would soon be lost in hallucinations of who he would meet in the afterlife. He died, at the Chelsea Hotel, that year, “unique, devious, saintly,” as Ginsberg eulogized, and far-out right to the end.
In 1988, Ginsberg arranged for Smith to teach shamanism at the Naropa Institute (now Naropa University) in Boulder, Colorado. When Ginsberg, who was paying all of Smith’s expenses, realized Smith was using the money he was sending him for rent to buy alcohol, he hired Rani Singh, then a student at Naropa, to look after him.
But this was not before Smith had amassed substantial debts that Ginsberg would be responsible for. Singh, now an author and art curator, has since devoted much of her life to furthering Smith’s legacy.
In 1991, Smith suffered a bleeding ulcer followed by cardiac arrest in Room 328 at the Hotel Chelsea in New York City. His friend, poet Paola Igliori, described him as dying in her arms “singing as he drifted away.” Smith was pronounced dead one hour later at St. Vincent’s Hospital.
Smith’s ashes were long in the care of his late friend, longtime participant in New York’s Beat scene, Rosemarie “Rosebud” Feliu-Pettet, who was Smith’s “spiritual wife.”
(From https://www.facebook.com/deborah.roldan.dixon?mibextid=LQQJ4d and combined with material from The New York Times Harry Smith, a Culture-Altering Shaman, at the Whitney — The New York Times (nytimes.com)
