Volume 45, Number 6 · April 9, 1998
Recapturing the American Sound
By Geoffrey O'Brien
Anthology of American Folk Music
compiled by Harry Smith
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, $79.00
Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes
by Greil Marcus
Henry Holt, 286 pp., $22.50
When We Were Good: The Folk Revival
by Robert Cantwell
Harvard University Press, 412 pp., $15.95 (paper)
Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity
by Richard A. Peterson
University of Chicago Press, 306 pp., $24.95
A collection of old 78s, eighty-four of them—discarded dance tunes and country blues, murder ballads and gospel hymns and comical numbers from an earlier era of commercial recording—was released in 1952 by Folkways Records under the title Anthology of American Folk Music. The assembler was Harry Smith, then twenty-nine years old, a collector, underground filmmaker, occult philosopher, fabulist, and scrounger who sometimes claimed to be the illegitimate son of the satanist Aleister Crowley and who by the time of his death in 1991 had earned the nickname 'the Paracelsus of the Chelsea Hotel.'[1]
Review, 7396 words
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