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In 1958, when the revival of American folk music was rising in the culture like a pent-up, powerful wave, a group called the Kingston Trio recorded an old North Carolina murder ballad called "Tom Dooley." The song itself was haunting — a tale of a girl named Laura Foster who was murdered in the hills and buried in a shallow grave.
But the Kingston Trio's popular rendition, which helped push roots music to center stage, was, frankly, awful. Today, it sounds straight off the soundtrack of the folk-music parody A Mighty Wind. It showed no affinity for the material and, in one musical gesture, turned pain and darkness into top 40 anecdote.
That's the danger when folk music — the Rosetta stone of American popular culture — is plundered by those deaf to the stories it carries. But when it's respected, when the pain and darkness is plumbed for meaning rather than just polished and packaged, the elastic nature of the folk tradition offers up endless possibilities.
An extraordinary new collection, The Harry Smith Project: Anthology of American Folk Music Revisited, does exactly that. It recruits such familiar voices as Steve Earle, Nick Cave, Elvis Costello, Beck and Wilco to be spiritual channelers of the oldest and most traditional American texts — the stories that helped shape our country and how we see ourselves.
In 1952, using the fresh technology of the long-play record, an eccentric little genius named Harry Smith assembled 84 recordings into a single compilation — the Anthology. The tracks were songs recorded commercially between 1927 and 1934 — an era considered the golden age of blues, early country and all the distinctly American offshoots of folk music.
Smith's obsession and curatorial skills made the Anthology a cultural loudspeaker that amplified some of our most enduring legends. John Henry, the steel-driving mountain of a man who died with a hammer in his hand; Stackolee, the notorious bad man who shot Billy Lyons over a Stetson hat, Frankie, who shot her man because he done her wrong. On the Anthology, the blues were everywhere: "Prison Cell Blues," "Spike Driver Blues," "Poor Boy Blues," "99 Year Blues," "White House Blues," "James Alley Blues."
And the artists: Mississippi John Hurt, Charlie Poole, Clarence "Tom" Ashley, Dock Boggs, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Buell Kazee. Many of them, legends today, had been forgotten then, but, as the cultural critic Greil Marcus wrote in his book Invisible Republic, the Anthology set them free: "They appeared now," he wrote, "like visitors from another world, like passengers on a ship that had drifted into the sea of the unwritten."
People noticed people such as Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, The Rolling Stones, The Band. The "Anthology" was scrutinized, appropriated, cannibalized and recombined piecemeal into new inspirations. It became a pool of musical footnotes that scattered like a diaspora through rock 'n' roll, rhythm and blues, the Nashville Sound.
This went on for decades, until it all became almost unspoken. Then Smith's Anthology was re-released on CD. And in 1999 and 2001, a musical visionary named Hal Willner convened a series of conceits in which modern artists reinterpreted the meat of Smith's compilation.
The result was — is — breathtaking.
Here is Beth Orton quietly singing a melancholy version of "Frankie," in which you can hear the raw pain of a woman rejected. Here is Nick Cave, master of the modern American murder ballad, sneering his way through "John the Revelator" in a performance worthy of the apocalypse itself. Here is Lou Reed, the master, channeling Lemon Jefferson in a driving, electric version of the old blues that sounds nothing like the original but somehow, inexplicably, contains it.
These are not imitations. They're nothing less than reinterpretations of the gospel. To call these merely covers is sort of like calling the New Testament a pale remake of the Old.
Accompanying DVD footage of the performances brings the whole thing to life, and an elegant documentary by Rani Singh helps put Smith into the context of both his era and ours. It's appropriate: The Anthology made time elastic, bringing those old artists into the modern age and casting the rest of us into the past to forage. The Harry Smith Project demonstrates that the most talented among us are still foraging through the ruins, still finding fresh treasures.
There is a moment in The Harry Smith Project that offers, in a microcosm, the possibilities of this material. Kate and Anna McGarrigle have just finished singing, in their ethereal voices, the age-old murder ballad "Ommie Wise." The song is an echo of an echo, containing perhaps a wisp of accuracy about some long-ago story and, yet, a heaping helping of truth.
In it, a young man named John Lewis kills the girl, Ommie, by pushing her into the water to drown. The McGarrigles tell the familiar sad story. Then comes Elvis Costello. He's unhappy. The murderer was never punished. Unfair.
"There's no justice in this world, you know?" Costello says. "He just got away with it, just like that?"
Costello won't have it. So he breathes life into a new chapter — "Ommie Wise, Part 2." He tells of John Lewis fleeing the Civil War battlefield in cowardice, haunted by the face of the girl he murdered as he hurtles inexorably toward the firing squad.
Poor Ommie Wise has been murdered over and over again in five generations of song, and Elvis Costello with pen, guitar and deep, full voice exacts overdue justice. John Lewis must pay, so Ommie can rest. History is made, in a song. History is changed, in a song.
That, more than anything, was Harry Smith's message, trumpeted with the songs he assembled: No matter how modern we think we have become, this is where we, the American folk, must return for our most basic stories. That recognition was the genius of the Anthology, and it's why The Harry Smith Project resonates today.
Harry Smith knew as Elvis Costello, Nick Cave, Steve Earle et al clearly realize, too — that only by understanding and claiming the old stories can we ever begin to write the new ones in the ways that truly matter.
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