This excellent biography by John Szwed, published in 2023, documents the life of one of the XXth Century's most interesting, intelligent and unique eccentrics. Harry Smith (1923 - 1991) defies easy description. He's been called a polymath for his expert comprehension, experimentation and innovation into a plethora of both arcane and popular arts and sciences. The book's byline reads: "The Filmmaker, Folklorist and Mystic who transformed American Art." From the dust jacket description:
"He was an anthropologist, a filmmaker, a painter, a folkorist, a mystic, and a walking encyclopedia. He taught Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe about the occult, swapped drugs with Timothy Leary, had a front row seat to a young Thelonius Monk, lived with (and tortured) Allen Ginsberg, was admired by Susan Sontag, and was one of the first artists funded by the Guggenheim Foundation."
My interest in him, in part, stems from the fact that he was an early recording engineer who kept it up, on and off, for his whole life. Smith grew up in the Pacific Northwest and developed a strong interest in Native American culture early on. At age 15 after discovering the writings of Franz Boas (1858 - 1942), the German-American pioneer of American anthropology, Smith began treks up and down the coast with portable recording equipment documenting indigenous tribal rituals through audio recordings, photography, water-color paintings, drawings and attempts to craft his own system of dance notation.
Szwed writes that Smith pursued this activity for 8 years. "Harry's seriousness, persistence and, humility gained him the respect of tribal leaders, who allowed him to use technology they might otherwise have had good reason to fear to document their songs, narratives, customs, language and games." He brought a disc-cutting machine to capture higher quality audio than the wire recorders which at that time comprised the standard. This fascinating period of Smith's life and career gets covered brilliantly in the book with much background and and intellectual context.
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"I'm glad to say that my dreams came true. I saw America changed through music."
– Harry Smith
Throughout his life Smith collected a wide variety of cultural artifacts including Seminole textiles, paper airplanes, Russian Easter Eggs, string figures like the Cat's Cradle, pop-up books, Tarot cards, etc., etc. some of these finding their way into museums like the Smithsonian. Szwed recounts how he got into string figures after reading a book by Kathleen Haddon, String Games for Beginners that demonstrated how to form a loop of string into various geometric shapes. He found out that these figures could be found everywhere on the planet and it became a lifelong area of research beginning with the Native American peoples he visited. He was interested in patterns that travelled across cultural boundaries. I suspect the influence of Franz Boas's aim to find out what it meant to be human.
Smith's collection of rare 78 recordings, beginning around 1940, eventually turned into the Anthology of American Folk Music. This had a profound influence on a wide range of musical artists including: Dylan, The Grateful Dead, Pete Seeger, Led Zeppelin, Springsteen, Sonic Youth, Elvis Costello, Beck, Wilco, Joan Baez, Taj Mahal, The Byrds, Canned Heat, Gordon Lightfoot, Harry Nilsson, Kris Kristofferson, Gillian Welch, Nick Cave, and Tom Waits to name a few. These recordings span from 1927 - 1932. Acquiring them became much more earnest in the early 1940's when the US government began melting them down to recycle their materials for the war effort.
In an essay by Luis Kemnitzer included in the Anthology's 1997 reissue he writes:
"In 1946 when I was shipping out of Seattle, Harry Smith was a legend among record collectors and jazz and country music enthusiasts that I met. People had been introduced to Lummi Midwinter Dances, which they called Spirit Dances, by Harry Smith. He had introduced blues record collectors to Jimmie Rodgers."
Moses Asche of Folkways Recordings commissioned Smith to assemble his favorite songs into a set that became the Anthology which included Harry's extensive anthropological descriptions and annotations. It was initially released in 1952, but took some years to catch on.
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Harry Smith first met the influential counter-cultural poet Ed Sanders in 1962 at a bar on Avenue A and 12th Street. Szwed writes: "He (Smith) was clutching a first edition of Aleister Crowley's Book of Lies and was declaring it a work of genius." A year or so later Sanders formed the Fugs with Tuli Kupferberg because they thought they could come up with better lyrics than the early Beatles songs which were becoming popular in underground (and not so underground) circles. Harry convinced Moe Asch to finance their first record and served as the Producer for it. Harry also came up with their name, the Fugs.
One of my favorite stories in the book concerns the attempt, lead by the Yippies, to exorcise or levitate the Pentagon in 1967. I had always considered this pure absurdist humor, but we find out that Ed Sanders, given the task of organizing it, relied on Harry to structure the ritual. He served as their magickal consultant providing them with some basic principles to go by. I would have loved to hear more about Smith's Thelemic connections. He was friends with Bill Breeze, the current Outer Head of the O.T.O. and James Wasserman who worked as Weiser and later became well known for his book designs of Thelemic related titles among other things. Harry illustrated the paperback edition of The Holy Books of Thelema. Breeze made him a Bishop in the Ecclesia Gnostic Catholica, the religious branch of the O.T.O.
Illustration by Harry Smith
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I feel a kindred spirit with Harry Smith through his interest in recording natural environmental sounds. The first time I did so happened at age 20 in the top floor of a hotel in Banff, Alberta when touring with a bar band called Relay. My friend, the lighting director Bob Gregory, had a reel to reel tape recorder. For a couple of days early in the morning I placed a pair of microphones outside the window of the penthouse suite where the band stayed and recorded the Dawn unfolding over Banff Avenue for about an hour each time. About 11 years later E. J. Gold made a comment to me that Bardo spaces could be navigated by sound. That set me on a path of recording ambient sounds in a variety of locations: sacred spaces, streets, museums, etc. I used a D.A.T. recorder and a Sony stereo condenser microphone to capture the sounds. Traveling and working throughout the planet with Bill Laswell in the late 80s and 1990s provided a wide variety of interesting locations. My first ambient recording of this nature occurred at the Basilica du Sacre Couer in Paris. Other recordings came from street sounds and temples in India (I recorded an elephant along with their sacred cows for the classical Indian violinist El Shankar), West Africa, the Australian Outback, Cairo and the King's Chamber in the Great Pyramid, the temple wall in Jerusalem, Rio de Janerio, Morocco, China, Mongolia, Tashkent, Samarkand, New York and Paris subways among others. I've also recorded interesting sounds found in my own backyard in Northern California. Les Claypool incorporated some of these on the Primus album Antipop. Tom Waits spoke highly of a sample reel of these recordings I made for him when auditioning for the job of his recording and mix engineer. In 2004, with Bill Laswell's help, I released a compilation of these called All Around the World on the Belgian label, Sub Rosa.
Cosmic Scholar recalls one phase of Smith's ambient recordings after moving to Boulder, Colorado in 1988 to stay and lecture at Naropa University, the school Tibetan Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa founded over a decade earlier. Allen Ginsberg had arranged Harry's residence there.
"Within a few weeks of his arrival, he had recorded hundreds of hours of ambient sounds, 'pointing to the correlation between auto horns and birdcalls, and the intercommunication between machines and the animate world.' he could record the sounds of Boulder with a mic out the window, including crickets, cicadas, and squirrels at different times of the day. He told Beth Borrus, his assistant for his summer lectures, that he was looking for patterns: 'It was a long time before I realized that the squirrels were carrying on intelligent communication between each other, which reached a peak in the day when they were able to stop the birds from singing when the sun came up, which is why I was recording the thing anyhow. They evidently had some prior agreement, the Dawn Chorale.'" - Cosmic Scholar, p. 333.
A few years ago I was working in Portland at Flora Recording a studio owned and operated by the prolific Producer and Engineer Tucker Martine. Tucker and I have some tangential history together: I had worked alongside his brother Layng at Laswell's studio in Brooklyn and we both had received some form of mentorship from genius Engineer Jason Corsaro. Tucker told me a story that while taking a musique concrete course at Naropa he worked at a coffee place in Boulder, a spot Harry Smith frequented. His boss advised him to strike up a conversation with Smith. He took the advice and had several conversations with Harry. I feel something subtle and intangible may have been passed on to Tucker with those interactions. He also got into making ambient field recordings and has released a couple of albums one of being Broken Hearted Dragonflies (Insect Electronica from Southeast Asia).
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Szwed also documents the crazy, chaotic, contradictory, indigent side of Smith's life. He has several anecdotes and stories along those lines. Smith never met a drug he didn't like and had a long and extensive history of alcohol abuse. He never had anything resembling a conventional means of income mostly living off of the sometimes strained generosity of others. When he sometimes received large or moderate sums of money to finance the art projects, he would often spend it recklessly. Paying his hotel bills or rent was never a priority. Somehow he always found money to constantly acquire books and drugs.
John Szwed questions his ability to write a good biography on such an elusive subject as Harry. He more than rises to the occasion with this definitive work. It's a fascinating read. I've left out whole areas of Smith's activities, most notably his filmmaking projects. It's a book that inspires creativity through Harry Smith's example. I give it 5 stars and highly recommend it.
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