Harry Everett Smith: Difference between revisions

Harry E. Smith
Smith c. 1965
Born	(1923-05-29)May 29, 1923
Died	November 27, 1991(1991-11-27) (aged 68)
Nationality	American
Occupation(s)	Visual artist, filmmaker, ethnographer
Awards	Grammy

Harry Everett Smith (May 29, 1923, Portland, Oregon – November 27, 1991, New York City) was a visual artist, experimental filmmaker, record collector, bohemian, mystic, and largely self-taught student of anthropology. Smith was an important figure in the Beat Generation scene in New York City, and his activities, such as his use of mind-altering substances, and interest in esoteric spirituality, anticipated aspects of the Hippie movement. 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, artifacts he collected included string figures, paper airplanes, Seminole textiles, and Ukrainian Easter eggs.

Biography

Harry Smith was born in Portland, Oregon, and grew up in an area between Seattle and Bellingham, Washington, where there were several Indian reservations. His parents were Theosophists with Pantheistic tendencies (involving the belief in an immanent God who is identical with the Universe or nature) and both were fond of folk music. His mother, Mary Louise, originally from Sioux City, Iowa, taught for a time on the Lummi Indian reservation. His father, Robert James Smith, worked as a watchman for a the Pacific American Fishers, a salmon canning company. Harry's paternal great-grandfather had been a prominent Freemason and a general on the Union side in the American Civil War. Harry's parents, who didn't get along, lived in separate houses, meeting only at dinner time. Although poor, they gave Harry an artistic education. "We were considered some kind of 'low' family,", Harry once said, "despite my mother's feeling that she was [an incarnation of] the Czarina of Russia" For a time, it is said, they ran an art school in their house. Friends recall that in high school Harry carried around a camera and in his high school yearbook said that he wanted to compose symphonic music.

Physically, Smith was undersized and had a curvature of the spine which kept him from being drafted. During World War II he had a job working 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 to buy blues records and was also able to scrape together enough money to formally study anthropology at the University of Washington in Seattle for five semesters between 1942 and 194, concentrating on American Indians, and making numerous 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, now 22, moved to the Bay Area of San Francisco, then home to a lively bohemian folk music and jazz scene. Smith was especially drawn to bebop, a new jazz form which had originated during impromptu jam sessions before and after paid performances; and San Francisco abounded in night spots and after hours clubs where Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker could be heard. While living in the Bay Area, Smith 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 addition to blues, he also began seriously collecting old hillbilly music records from junk dealers and stores which were going out of business.

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. When his money ran out, he brought the record collection to Moe Asch, president of Folkways Records, with the idea of selling it. Instead, Asch proposed 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 an office for Smith to work in.

Anthologist of American folk music

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. These dated from the abbreviated dawn, sometimes called the "golden age", of the commercial country music industry, that is, between 1927, when, as Smith explained, "acoustic recording [sic] made possible accurate music reproduction, and 1932, when the Depression halted folk music sales", and the artists, in many cases, had subsequently sunk into obscurity. Originally issued as as budget discs marketed to regional, rural audiences, these 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 non-specialist, affluent urban dwellers. LP discs could hold much more material than the old three-minute 78s, and had far greater fidelity and less surface noise. They were packaged as a set of three boxed albums, each box front a different color. Priced at $25.00 ($216.00 in 2012) per two-disc set, they were a luxury item. A fourth album, comprising topical songs, was originally planned by Asch and his long-time assistant Marian Distler, and never realized by Smith. It was issued in 2000, nine years after his death in CD format by Revenant Records with a 95-page booklet of tribute essays to Smith.

The music on Smith's anthology, performed by such artists as Clarence Ashley, Dock Boggs, The Carter Family, Mississippi John Hurt, Dick Justice, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Buell Kazee, and Bascom Lamar Lunsford, greatly influenced the folk & blues revivals of the 1950s and 60s and were covered by The New Lost City Ramblers, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez, to name a few. 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."

Smith's presentation was a marked departure from the more social or politically oriented folk song collections of the 1930s and 40s. His liner notes avoided localized historical and social commentary, consisting instead of terse, evocative synopses – riffs – written in the manner of telegraph messages or newspaper headlines as though from an otherworldly realm, seemingly both timeless and avant-garde. For example, for "King Kong Kitchie Kitchie Ki-Me-O" ("Frog Went A-Courting") by Chubby Parker, a song that has been traced to 1548, Smith wrote: "Zoologic Miscegeny Achieved Mouse Frog Nuptuals [sic], Relatives Approve."

Smith was also unique in associating folk music with the occult: the design he chose to be printed on the box covers, for example, was taken from an engraving by Theodore de Bry of the Celestial Monochord (the instrument symbolizing the music of the spheres), that had illustrated a sixteenth-century treatise on music by the Elizabethan magus Robert Fludd.

Smith told interviewer John Cohen, that he had first heard this kind of record at the Berkeley home of Bertrand Harris Bronson, an eminent English professor and ballad scholar. who collected them. In 1946 Smith reportedly lived for a time in small room with a separate entrance on the first floor of Bronson's Berkeley home, and it is thought he may have received informal tutelage in folk music through his acquaintance with the scholar.

Smith also told Cohen that in selecting his material he relied heavily on the Library of Congress's mimeographed "List of American Folk Songs on Commercial Records", a monograph compiled by Alan Lomax in 1940 with the assistance of Pete Seeger that Lomax and Seeger had sent out to folk song scholars. Twelve of the 60 songs and many of the artists on this list appear in Smith’s collection.

Cohen asked Smith: "Where did you first hear of the Carter Family?”

Smith: I would think from that mimeographed list that the Library of Congress issued around 1937 [sic], "American Folksongs on Commercially Available Records" [sic]. Shortly after that, two Carter Family recordings, "Worried Man Blues" and "East Virginia Blues" were reissued on the album Smoky Mountain Ballads. That album would come to stores that wouldn’t ordinarily have Carter Family records.

John Cohen: In that album John and Alan Lomax made hillbilly music respectable enough to have it sold along with art music and symphonies.

For the Anthology, in any case, Smith told Cohen he had selected the songs based on what he thought would be of interest to scholars and to people who might like to sing them.

In 1991, shortly before his death, Smith was the recipient of a Grammy, the Chairman's Merit Award for Lifetime Achievement. Elvis Costello remarked: "We're lucky that somebody compiled the Anthology as intelligently and as imaginatively so that it can tell a series of stories to future musicians and listeners, and be a starting point."

In 1997, Smith's collection was re-released as a boxed set of six CDs on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, as the Anthology of American Folk Music (now also informally referred to as "The Harry Smith Anthology").

Other recording projects

In addition to compiling the Folkways anthology, Smith was also instrumental in getting Folkways to produce the The Fugs First Album (1965), now considered the first "folk rock" album. In 1973 Smith recorded performances held at his room at the Hotel Chelsea (for a project called "deonage") of, among other things, originally composed folk and protest songs written and performed by his long-time friend, Allen Ginsberg, accompanying himself on the harmonium. These included, "CIA Dope Calypso", "MacDougal Street Blues", "Bus Ride Ballad Ride to Suva", and "Dope Fiend Blues", among others, all later issued on an LP entitled New York Blues: Rags, Ballads and Harmonium Songs (Folkways, 1981).

In keeping with his interest in chemically altered states of consciousness, Smith made field recordings documenting Kiowa peyote meeting songs, which Folkways issued as a multi-LP set.

Experimental films

Critical attention has been most often paid to Smith's experimental work with film. He produced extravagant abstract animations. The effects were often painted or manipulated by hand directly on the celluloid. Themes of mysticism, surrealism and dada were common elements in his work.

Information, especially about Smith's early films, is uncertain, due to the work-in-progress nature of experimental filmmaking. He frequently reedited them (hence the different runtimes), incorporating on various occasions reassembled footage of different film to be viewed with varying music tracks. For instance, the handmade films now known as No. 1, 2, 3, and 5 were accompanied by an improvising jazz band on May 12, 1950 when they premiered as part of the Art in Cinema series curated by Smith's friend Frank Stauffacher at the San Francisco Museum of Art, though Smith had originally intended them to be accompanied by recordings of beat favorite Dizzy Gillespie. Later he showed the films with random records or even the radio as accompaniment. Smith stated that his films were made for contemporary music, and he kept changing their soundtracks. Smith also re-cut Early Abstractions to sync with Meet the Beatles! picked out by his wife, Rosebud Feliu-Pettet. After Smith's death, artists such as Philip Glass or DJ Spooky provided musical backgrounds for screenings of his films: Glass at the 2004 summer benefit concert of the Film-Makers' Cooperative and DJ Spooky at several venues in 1999 for Harry Smith: A Re-creation, an embroidered compendium of Smith's films put together by his close collaborator M. Henry Jones who tries to screen the films in the manner intended by Smith - as performances - using stroboscopic effects, multiple projections, magic lanterns, and the like.

The present-day numbering system which Smith introduced some time between 1951 and 1964–65 (the year the Film-Makers' Cooperative started distributing 16 mm copies of his films) includes only films that survived up to that point. Thus this filmography is in no way a comprehensive list of all the films he has ever made, all the more as he is known to have lost, sold, traded or even wantonly destroyed some of his own works. The dating of the film presents another puzzle. Since Smith frequently worked for years on them and kept little to no documentation, the information varies considerably from one source to another. Therefore all available information has been added to the following list, inevitably resulting in a loss of clarity but having the advantage of giving the whole picture. The films are also known by variant designation, i.e. Film No. 1, Film # 1 or simply # 1.

Smith's films are in the collection of Anthology Film Archives who has preserved them since the 1970s.

Visual art

Smith's early efforts in the field of fine art painting were freeform abstractions intended to visually represent notes, measures, beats and riffs of the beatnik era jazz music that inspired him.

There is photographic evidence of Smith's large paintings created in the 1940s; however, the works themselves were destroyed by Smith himself. He did not destroy his work on film (although he did misplace a few) and this legacy supplements the nature and design of his paintings. Smith created several later works, some of which have been serially printed in limited editions. Much of his imagery is inspired by Kabbalistic themes such as the Sephirah, where the Planetary Spheres are distributed like musical notes upon a staff—details that Smith would find very important to note here—and is reflected in his choice of graphics and cover art of the Anthology of American Folk Music.

Occult Interests

Smith said he had become acquainted with the Lummi Indians through his mother's teaching work and claimed to have participated in shamanic initiation at a young age. He recorded Lummi songs and rituals using homemade equipment and notation of his own devising and developed an important collection of Native American religious objects.

In the late 1940s he began work with Charles Stansfeld Jones and Albert Handel. Smith also created a set of irregularly-shaped Tarot cards, one of which was adapted for the color Ordo Templi Orientis degree certificates, and used with several others for the paperback Holy Books of Thelema which Smith designed. He also studied the Enochian system in depth, compiling a concordance of the Enochian language with the aid of Khem Caigan, his assistant throughout much of the 1970s and early 1980s. Smith was a familiar figure in the New York Ordo Templi Orientis from the late 1970s on and, although he was never a member of the O.T.O., in 1986 he was consecrated a bishop in the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica.

Death

Smith suffered a bleeding ulcer followed by cardiac arrest in 1991 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". He was pronounced dead one hour later at St. Vincent's Hospital.

Smith's ashes are in the care of his friend, Rosebud Feliu-Pettet, writer and longtime participant in New York's Beat scene, who has been described by Igliori as Smith's "spiritual wife."

Filmography

• Early Abstractions (1939-56 or 1941-57 or 1946-52 or 1946-57) (assembled ca. 1964) 16 mm, black & white and color, 22 min. Originally silent, then accompanied by a reel-to-reel tape with songs by The Fugs—whose first album Smith produced —and subsequently by an optical soundtrack featuring Meet the Beatles!. The 1987 video release features Teiji Ito's musical piece Shaman. At first, the anthology included only No. 1-4, later No. 5, 7, and 10 were added. The individual films however are not divided, they play as one. This anthology, in 2006, was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
• No. 1: A Strange Dream (1939-47 or 1946-48) hand-painted 35 mm stock photographed in 16 mm, color, silent, 2:20 or 5 min. Initially intended to be screened with and synchronized to Dizzy Gillespie's Manteca or Guarachi Guaro. "...the history of the geologic period reduced to orgasm length."
• No. 2: Message From the Sun (1940-42 or 1946-48) hand-painted 35 mm stock photographed in 16 mm, color, 2:15 or 10 min. Initially intended to be screened with and synchronized to Dizzy Gillespie's Algo Bueno. This film "takes place either inside the sun or in... Switzerland" according to Smith. To produce this film he used a technique that involved cutting stickers of the type used to reinforce the holes in 3-ring binder paper. These were applied to 16 mm movie film and used like a stencil. Layers of vaseline and paint were used to color each frame in this manner. The effect is hypnotic, psychedelic and is something like a visual music.
• No. 3: Interwoven (1942-47 or 1947-49) hand-painted 35 mm stock photographed in 16 mm, color, 3:20 or 10 min. Reportedly cut down from about 30 min. Initially intended to be screened with and synchronized to Dizzy Gillespie's Guarachi Guaro or Manteca. "Batiked animation made of dead squares..." (Available on the DVD collection Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde Film, 1947-1986 [2008].)
• No. 4: Fast Track a.k.a. Manteca (1947 or 1949-50) 16 mm, black & white and color, 2:16 or 6 min. Silent though possibly intended to be screened with Dizzy Gillespie's Manteca. The film starts with a color sequence showing Smith's painting Manteca (ca. 1950) with which he tried to subjectively depict Gillespie's song, every brushstroke representing a music note. The film concludes with black & white superimpositions.
• No. 5: Circular Tensions (Homage to Oskar Fischinger) (1949–50) 16 mm, color, silent, 2:30 or 6 min. Sequel to No. 4.
• No. 6 (1948-51 or 1950-51) 16 mm, color, silent or mono, 1:30 or 20 min. Untraced red-green anaglyph 3-D film.
• No. 7: Color Study (1950-51-52) 16 mm, color, silent, 5:25 or 15 min. "Optically printed Pythagoreanism in four movements supported on squares, circles, grillwork, and triangles with an interlude concerning an experiment."
• No. 8 (1954 or 1957) 16 mm, black & white, silent, 5 min. Untraced collage. Later expanded to No. 12.
• No. 9 (1954 or 1957) 16 mm, color, 10 min. Untraced collage.
• No. 10: Mirror Animations (1956–57) 16 mm, color, 3:35 or 10 min. Study for No. 11. "An exposition of Buddhism and the Kaballah in the form of a collage. The final scene shows Agaric mushrooms growing on the moon while the Hero and Heroine row by on a cerebrum."
• No. 11: Mirror Animations (1956–57) 16 mm, color, 3:35 or 8 min. Features Thelonious Monk's Misterioso. Cut-up and collage animation. Later expanded to No. 17.
• No. 12: Heaven and Earth Magic a.k.a. The Magic Feature a.k.a. Heaven and Earth Magic Feature (1943-58 or 1950-60 or 1950-61 or 1957-62 or 1959-61) (reedited several times between 1957–62) 16 mm, black & white, mono, initially 6 hours, later versions of 2 hours and 67 min. Extended version of No. 8. Collage animation culled from 19th century catalogs meant to be shown using custom-made projectors fit out with color filters (gels, wheels, etc.) and masking hand-painted glass slides to alter the projected image. Smith explains, "The first part depicts the heroine's toothache consequent to the loss of a very valuable watermelon, her dentistry and transportation to heaven. Next follows an elaborate exposition of the heavenly land, in terms of Israel and Montreal. The second part depicts the return to Earth from being eaten by Max Müller on the day Edward VII dedicated the Great Sewer of London." Jonas Mekas gave the film—which is often regarded as Smith's major work—its title in 1964/65.
• No. 13: Oz a.k.a. The Magic Mushroom People of Oz (1962) 35 mm widescreen (scope), color, stereo, 3 hours or 108 min. but only 20-30 min. are known to survive. Unfinished commercial adaptation of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz which was shelved after Harry's close friend, the executive producer and primary financial backer Arthur Young died of cancer. Portions released as No. 16, 19, and 20. From the reported three to six hours of camera test footage (rushes) only ca. 15 minutes, in the form of non-color-corrected rushes, is known to be extant. The only completed bit is The Approach to Emerald City, a 5 (other sources say 9 resp. 12) minute sequence set to music from Charles Gounod's Faust.
• No. 14: Late Superimpositions (1963-64-65) 16 mm, color, 29 min. Structured 122333221. Features the beginning of the opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht as recorded in 1956 by Lotte Lenya, the Norddeutscher Radiochor (Max Thurn) and the Norddeutsches Radio-Orchester (Wilhelm Brückner-Rüggeberg). Later expanded to No. 18. "I honor it the most of my films, otherwise a not very popular one before 1972." Shot in New York City and Anadarko.
• No. 15 (1965–1966) 16 mm, color, silent, 10 min. Animation of Seminole patchwork.
• No. 16: Oz - The Tin Woodman's Dream (1967) 35 mm widescreen (scope), color, silent, 14:30 min. Consists of The Approach to Emerald City (cf. note on No. 13) followed by about 10 minutes of kaleidoscopic footage shot ca. 1966. See also No. 20.
• No. 17: Mirror Animations (extended version) (1962-76 or 1979) 16 mm, color, 12 min. Features Thelonious Monk's Misterioso. Extended version of No. 11 printed forward-backward-forward.
• No. 18: Mahagonny (1970-1980: shot 70-72, edited 72-80) 16 mm, color, tetraptych screen (initially with four 16 mm projectors, now composited onto a single 35 mm strip), 141 min. (edited down from over 11 hours of material). With Allen Ginsberg, Jonas Mekas, Patti Smith and images of Robert Mapplethorpe installations. "A mathematical analysis of Marcel Duchamp's The Large Glass, expressed in terms of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny" upon which it is loosely based. Smith divided the images into four groups (Portraits, Animations, Symbols and Nature) and, with the assistance of Khem Caigan, arranged them as a series of procedural permutations in relation to the opera: every reel contains twenty-four scenes forming the palindrome PASA-PASNA-PASAP-ANSAP-ASAP-N. Note that the entire series hinges on Nature, followed by Symbols. Extended version of No. 14 (it also uses the same 1956 German language recording) Smith considered this film to be the ground-breaking harbinger of his unfinished masterwork, which was to have been an explication of the Four Last Things.
• No. 19 (1980) 35 mm widescreen (scope), color, silent. Untraced excerpts from No. 13. See also No. 20.
• No. 20: Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1981) 35 mm widescreen (scope), color, silent, 27 min. Consists of No. 16 and No. 19.

References

• Autobiography (1950s, Jordan Belson) Glances of Smith, Hy Hirsh, and others from the San Francisco Beat scene. Jordan Belson archive, Center for Visual Music, Los Angeles.
• Birth of a Nation (1997, Jonas Mekas) 16 mm, color, 85 min. Snippets of 160 underground film people (among them Smith) recorded between 1955 and 1996.
• Restoring Harry Smith's Mahagonny a.k.a. Making of Mahagonny (2000 or 2002, Simon Lund) 35 mm, color, 6 min. Short documentary on the restoration of No. 18. Watch it here.
• American Magus. Harry Smith (2001–02, Paola Igliori) video, color, 93 min. Documentary on Smith interweaving clips from his films, pictures from his countless collections, drawings, paintings, rare archive footage and snatches of interviews with Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lionel Ziprin, Robert Frank, Jonas Mekas, John Cohen, James Wasserman, M. Henry Jones, Percy Heath, Grateful Dead, Patti Smith, DJ Spooky, Khem Caigan, Harvey Bialy and Smith's wife Rosebud Feliu-Pettet, among others. Photographer, writer, publisher, and filmmaker Paola Igliori, who Smith befriended a few months before his death, and in whose arms Smith died, is also the editor of a book of the same title released by her own publishing house Inanout Press (see Bibliography).
• On Mahagonny (2002, Rani Singh) video, color, 15 min. Jonas Mekas and others discuss No. 18. Also features a conversation between Smith and critic P. Adams Sitney shot by André S. Labarthe in 1971. Rani Singh is a former assistant of Smith (1987–1991), founder and current director of the Harry Smith Archives as well as research associate at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.
• The Old, Weird America: Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music (2006, Rani Singh) video, black & white and color, 90 min. Documentary with Nick Cave, Elvis Costello, Philip Glass, Emmylou Harris, Bob Neuwirth, Beth Orton, Lou Reed, Beck, David Johansen, Greil Marcus, Hal Willner, Allen Ginsberg, Percy Heath, Steve Earle, Luis Kemnitzer, among others.
• Foye, Raymond, ed. (2002). The Heavenly Tree Grows Downward: Selected Works by Harry Smith, Philip Taaffe, and Fred Tomaselli. New York: James Cohan Gallery.
• Igliori, Paola, ed. (1996). American Magus Harry Smith: A Modern Alchemist. New York: Inanout Press. (review)
• Perchuk, Andrew, and Singh, Rani, eds. (2010). Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the American Vernacular (Issues & Debates). Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute.
• Singh, Rani, ed. (1999). Think of the Self Speaking: Harry Smith, Selected Interviews. Seattle: Elbow/Cityful Press. Introduction by Allen Ginsberg (review)
• Sitney, P. Adams (1979). Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-1978. New York: Oxford University Press.

External links

• Harry Smith Archives
• Michael Duncan: An American Original (Art in America report on the symposium)
• Allen Ginsberg and Paola Igliori discuss the life and times of Harry Smith (milk magazine)
• Rani Singh, "Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: Unearthing the Harry Smith Archives", Animation World Magazine 3 (December, 1998): 9.
• Jonathan L. Knapp: Occult classic: Tapping into the magic of Harry Smith (San Francisco Bay Guardian)
• "American Magus: Harry Smith: A Modern Alchemist". Excerpt from American Magus: Harry Smith: A Modern Alchemist, Paola Igliori, editor, (1996).
• Doug Harvey, "Dismembering Harry Smith", May 10, 2001, L. A. Weekly),
• Tom Paley / Peter Stampfel: Harry Smith Tribute (excerpt of tribute essays from the liner notes of the Smithsonian The Anthology of American Folk Music reissue)
• Alex Abramovitch: Harry Smith. The Anthology of American Folk Music. The Smithsonian (Salon.com) Review.
• The Anthology of American Folk Music's influence on Bob Dylan (BobDylan.com)
• Biography of Smith from website of Sonic Youth.
• Biography of Smith from website of PS 1 .
• The Celestial Monochord: Journal of the Institute for Astrophysics and the Hillbilly Blues. Dedicated to Harry Smith's Folkways Anthology, early old-time commercial recordings, and the folk music revival