It may in fact be misleading to refer to a ‘method’ in Smith’s work, since Smith was
essentially just gathering records because of a personal interest. Unlike every other collector discussed in the thesis, who had a clear method to their collecting whether it was textual scholarship, transcribing, or audio recording, and a clear aim for their collection, Smith was simply buying old records from junk shops and bankrupt record shops. Although he was looking for a particularly unusual sounding records, good performances, or well – known songs, there was nevertheless very little method to his collecting, and certainly nothing in keeping with the context of the folklore discipline. In this respect, as in certain others, Smith was something of an anomaly in the American collecting tradition because his collecting did not follow on from any other collector. Smith does cite the 1941 78rpm collection Smoky
Mountain Ballads as being part of his inspiration for collecting old 78s, and the content of
the collection Smith produced shows a great degree of familiarity with the work of the Lomaxes, but again in terms of method Smith is unlike any of the collectors working in America. In fact, the only other collector in this thesis to have collected commercially produced 78s was Alan Lomax for his List of American Folksongs on Commercial Records in 1942. Smith also cites this as one of his inspirations, and this does seem likely given that some of the recordings on the Anthology, and all of the performers, are included in Lomax’s list. In the introduction to his list, Alan records some of his selection criteria,
403
The choices have been personal and have been made for all sorts of reasons. Some of the records are interesting for their complete authenticity of
performance; some for their melodies; some because they included texts of important or representative songs; some because they represented typical contemporary deviations from rural singing and playing styles of fifty years ago; some to make the list as nearly as possible typical of the material I examined.404
Although Alan had the aim of demonstrating the value of commercial recordings in mind when he examined these records, some of his reasons for including records are similar to those of Smith, such as important songs, good performances, and interesting playing styles. Although Smith did not have the same aims in mind as Lomax, a minor aspect of his
collecting methods was based on prior work done by Lomax.
It is likely that a good deal of Smith’s collecting took place in the immediate post – war years, and took place while Smith was living in New York on the fringes of the Beat movement. It is arguable that this atmosphere of post – war cultural subversion may have impacted on Smith’s decision to collect records from the 20s and 30s, some of which were recycled during the war to recover the shellac used in their manufacture. These expendable artefacts, which were as much a record of the Great Depression’s impact on the recording boom as they were a record of the recording boom itself, could be seen as an early reaction against the post – war prosperity of the 1950s. Cantwell suggests that this subversive agenda comes through in Smith’s collection,
The Anthology in a sense ratifies, but at the cultural and not the ideological level, the program of subversion with which it has been associated historically. It anticipates the popular music that followed it in a more than musical sense.405
Smith’s collecting may have been partly determined by this intellectual context of cultural subversion, and although there were very few inherited practices in his record collecting,
404 Lomax, Alan. 1942. List of American Folk Songs on Commercial Records. United States Government Printing Office, Washington.
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like all the collecting discussed in this thesis it did no emerge from nothing, and in fact was somewhat dictated by the context in which Smith was working.
The talent scouts who recorded for companies like Columbia, Paramount, Brunswick, Okeh etc. always attempted to record the most commercially appealing material, often requesting songs that performers would not ordinarily sing, or using mannerisms that gave folky authenticity to the recording.406 It could be argued that Smith was working with less authentic material because of its commercial origin and associated manipulation, but the palimpsest of edited song texts Child was using were even more heavily manufactured, and often with a commercial agenda as well.407 Also, such a criticism of the Anthology is
predicated on the assumption that authenticity is always an important aspect of a
collection. Although previous collectors have valued their own conception of authenticity, there is no objective standard of authenticity against which the Anthology can be measured. As Peterson points out, authenticity is a construct which invariably influences how
something is received, but there are no legitimate grounds on which commercial recordings can be decried as inauthentic.408 As Bendix points out, the idea of commercial records being inauthentic was slightly outdated by the time Smith was collecting, and when Alan Lomax compiled his list of commercial records. ‘What has been gained in the two hundred years since Herder is an understanding that cultural relativity presents itself differently from one realm to the next.’409 This understanding of cultural relativity was present in the work of Lomax, and his various criteria aside from authenticity demonstrate that he understood the same properties were in these commercial records as could be found in his own field
recordings. Although Smith recalled in the 1969 interview that he learned there were better performers than John Jacob Niles available on recordings, this was less to do with
authenticity than it was performance style and repertoire.
Although there was very little in Smith’s collecting that resembled a methodology, especially one adapted from the context of the folklore discipline as the other collectors in this thesis did, Smith did still have principles which governed his collecting. Aside from the
406
Peterson, Richard A. 1997. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. University of Chicago Press. 407
Filene, Benjamin. 2000. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music. University of North Carolina Press. p. 10.
408
Peterson, Richard A. 1997. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. University of Chicago Press. p. 5.
409 Bendix, Regina. 1997. In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies. University of Wisconsin Press. p. 199.
previously discussed desire to find records which had accomplished, or unusual, performances, and especially proverbial or venerable songs, Smith had more oblique principles as well. These involved tracing the connections Smith saw between objects, generally through the rudiments of occultism and important patterns of colour, shape, and sound. As Cantwell observes,
By background and training – he had studied anthropology at the University of Washington – the man who created the single most important oral anthology of the folk revival approached the world scientifically, habitually collecting and investigating, searching for patterns and the principles that linked them in aural and visual realms.410
This is a very important point, since Cantwell asserts that Smith’s search for connections was a scientific practice, based on his training in anthropology, and this has implications for the idea that Smith had no real method. In fact, Smith may have had a deeply scientific method for gathering particular recordings, but this method was designed to look for patterns which are unclear to the user of the Anthology. Cantwell likens this system to the work of Robert Fludd, who developed a conception of a ‘memory theatre’ in which the totality of knowledge could be presented in an amphitheatre 411 In fact, it could be argued that Smith’s intellectual context for his collecting work was loosely connected to the folklore discipline, and the work of Alan Lomax in particular, but was had far more to do with the science and mysticism of Robert Fludd, the occultism of Aleister Crowley, and
Rosicrucianism and Theosophy.