But the money—as always with Smith—wasn’t enough, whether for the drugs he loved or the films he loved to make with them. So Smith sought out a record label head by the name of Moses Asch to buy thousands of his records. Smith needed cash more than shellac; Asch demurred. His finances, after all, weren’t exactly stable. Only four years earlier, his first label had cratered, sending him into bankruptcy. Because of those legal woes, his longtime secretary, Marian Distler, registered alone as the president of an all-new label, Folkways, never even mentioning Asch in the paperwork. Distler and Asch were surviving on $25 per week.
Rather than spend a fortune he did not have, Asch presented Smith with a counterproposal: The 33 1/3 LP was steadily gaining post-war popularity, so why didn’t Smith comb through his 78s and pick the most compelling tracks, the most gripping documents of American folk? If Smith would sequence them, Asch would issue the results with the imprimatur of his young Folkways imprint. Folkways had already released strong sets of Southern rags and blues and East Tennessee gospel, and others had released troves of folk elsewhere. But Smith, Asch later said, understood this music’s “relationship to the world.” He could do it better.
And so Smith—a struggling 28-year-old artist who embraced the occult and sometimes insisted Aleister Crowley was his father, new to New York from the Pacific Northwest—made a mixtape, largely documenting the struggles and songs of the American Southeast. The Anthology of American Folk Music, originally released in August 1952, collects 84 white-hot cuts of early blues, country, gospel, Cajun, cowboy, jazz, jug, and dance, jumping across those supposedly color-lined genres with revelatory aplomb.
These songs were only a couple decades old when Smith repurposed them; they were so strange and uncanny, listeners assumed the artists were dead. In effect, Smith had reached across the lacuna between the Great Depression and World War II, a period when vinyl sales cratered almost entirely, and pulled an almost forgotten past back into the country’s present. Some tunes here read like ill-informed news summaries of the Titanic’s disaster or presidential assassinations, while others are emphatic paeans to a ferocious and feared god. One man vows to run away with his love forever, while many others share dastardly deeds of betrayal, cheating, and murder. There is dying and dancing, working too hard and working too little, fucking and fussing and fighting, all tucked into four wonderfully overwhelming hours.
Smith split his mix into three broad sets of about 28 songs each. Each set got a symbolically colored cover, the hue tapped from his lifelong interest in alchemy—green “Ballads,” for water; red “Social Music,” for fire; and blue “Songs,” for air. There’s been much ado made about his intentional track-to-track connections, how a lyric or an idea from one song arrows into the next. Look for such links, and you’ll often find them. Instead, I recommend letting the Anthology wash over you as a whole, revealing a world where anything could and often does happen. When he spent time with the Salish tribes in his youth, he recognized his interest in “music in relation to existence,” how sound could mirror the mercuriality of life. This was that realization’s triumphant apotheosis.