Track Listing

Disc 1:

1. Henry Lee - Dick Justice
2. Fatal Flower Garden - Nelstone's Hawaiians
3. House Carpenter - Clarence Ashley
4. Drunkard's Special - Coley Jones
5. Old Lady and the Devil - Bill & Belle Reed
6. Butcher's Boy (The Railroad Boy) - Buell Kazee
7. Wagoner's Lad [Loving Nancy] - Buell Kazee
8. King Kong Kitchie Kitchie Ki-Me-O - Chubby Parker
9. Old Shoes and Leggins - Uncle Eck Dunford
10. Willie Moore - Richard Burnett, Leonard Rutherford
11. Lazy Farmer Boy - Buster Carter, Preston Young
12. Peg and Awl - The Carolina Tar Heels
13. Omie Wise - G.B. Grayson
14. My Name Is John Johanna - Kelly Harrell

Disc 2:

1. Bandit Cole Younger - Edward L. Crain
2. Charles Giteaux - Kelly Harrell
3. John Hardy Was a Desperate Little Man - Carter Family
4. Gonna Die With My Hammer in My Hand - Curry, The Williamson Brothers
5. Stackalee - Frank Hutchison
6. White House Blues - North Carolina Ramblers, Charlie Poole
7. Frankie - Mississippi John Hurt
8. When That Great Ship Went Down - Versey Smith, William Smith
9. Engine 143 - Carter Family
10. Kassie Jones - Furry Lewis
11. Down on Penny's Farm - The Bently Boys
12. Mississippi Boweavil Blues - Masked Marvels
13. Got the Farm Land Blues - The Carolina Tar Heels

Disc 3:

1. Sail Away Ladies [Fiddle Solo] - Uncle Bunt Stephens
2. Wild Wagoner [Frolic Tune] - Jilson Setters
3. Wake up Jacob - Prince Albert Hunt's Texas Ramblers
4. Danseuse [The Dancer] - Blind Uncle Gaspard, Delma Lachney
5. Georgia Stomp - Andrew & Jim Baxter
6. Brilliancy Medley - Eck Robertson
7. Indian War Whoop [Country Dance] - Hoyt Ming and His Pep Steppers
8. Old Country Stomp - Henry Thomas
9. Old Dog Blue - Jim Jackson
10. Saut' Crapaud [Jump, Frog] - Columbus Frugé
11. Arcadian One-Step - Joseph Falcon
12. Home Sweet Home - The Breaux Fréres
13. Newport Blues - Cincinnati Jug Band
14. Moonshiner's Dance (Pt. 1) - Frank Cloutier, Victoria Cafe Orchestra

Disc 4:

1. You Must Be Born Again - Reverend J.M. Gates
2. Oh Death, Where Is Thy Sting - Reverend J.M. Gates
3. Rocky Road - Alabama Sacred Harp Singers
4. Present Joys - Alabama Sacred Harp Singers
5. This Song of Love - Middle Georgia Singing Convention
6. Judgement - Rev. Sister Mary M. Nelson
7. He Got Better Things for You - Memphis Sanctified Singers
8. Since I Laid My Burden Down
9. John the Baptist [Singing Sermon] - Rev. Moses Mason
10. Dry Bones - Bascom Lamar Lunsford
11. John the Revelator - Blind Willie Johnson
12. Little Moses - Carter Family
13. Shine on Me - Ernest Phipps
14. Fifty Miles of Elbow Room - Rev. F.W. McGee
15. I'm in the Battlefield for My Lord - Rev. D.C. Rice & His Sanctified Congregation

Disc 5:

1. Cuckoo - Clarence Ashley
2. East Virginia - Buell Kazee
3. Minglewood Blues - Cannon's Jug Stompers
4. I Woke up One Morning in May - Didier Hébert
5. James Alley Blues - Richard Rabbit Brown
6. Sugar Baby - Dock Boggs
7. I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground - Bascom Lamar Lunsford
8. Mountaineer's Courtship - Ernest V. Stoneman, Hattie Stoneman
9. Spanish Merchant's Daughter - The Stoneman Family, The Stonemans
10. Bob Lee Junior Blues - Memphis Jug Band
11. Single Girl, Married Girl - Carter Family
12. Vieux Soulard et Sa Femme [The Old Drunkard and His Wife] - Cleoma Breaux, Joseph Falcon
13. Rabbit Foot Blues - Blind Lemon Jefferson
14. Expressman Blues - Sleepy John Estes

Disc 6:

1. Poor Boy Blues - Ramblin' Thomas
2. Feather Bed - Cannon's Jug Stompers
3. Country Blues - Dock Boggs
4. 99 Years Blues - Julius Daniels
5. Prison Cell Blues - Blind Lemon Jefferson
6. See That My Grave Is Kept Clean - Blind Lemon Jefferson
7. C'Est Si Triste Sans Lui [It Is So Blue Without Him] - Cleoma Breaux, Ophy Breaux, Joseph Falcon
8. Way Down the Old Plank Road - Uncle Dave Macon
9. Buddy Won't You Roll Down the Line - Uncle Dave Macon
10. Spike Driver Blues - Mississippi John Hurt
11. K.C. Moan - Memphis Jug Band
12. Train on the Island - J.P. Nestor
13. Lone Star Trail - Ken Maynard
14. Fishin' Blues - Henry Thomas

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3905 in Music
• Released on: 1997-08-19
• Number of discs: 6
• Formats: Enhanced, Original recording remastered
• Dimensions: 2.43 pounds

Album Description
This deluxe 6-CD collector's boxed set contains a 96-page book featuring Harry Smith's original songbook framed by essays by Greil Marcus and other noted writers, musicians, and scholars. Play the enhanced sixth disc on your CD-ROM drive and access historic video footage, rare photos, artist interviews, and additional background information. Edited by Harry Smith. Reissue compiled by the staff of Smithsonian Folkways. Reissue liner notes by Greil Marcus, Neil Rosenberg, Jeff Place, Jon Pankake, Luis Kemnitzer and others. "...the missing link in rock's official history." -Newsweek ***** (five stars) -Rolling Stone

Amazon.com
This impressive--and frankly, fun--musical document is still sending out shock waves almost 50 years after its original 1952 vinyl release. The Smithsonian's six-CD reissue is painstakingly researched, annotated, and packaged (even boasting an enhanced disc for the techno-capable). Unlike field recorders, eccentric filmmaker/collector/musicologist Harry Smith assembled the Anthology from commercially released (though obscure) 78 rpm discs issued between 1927 and 1935. Its broad scope--from country blues to Cajun social music to Appalachian murder ballads--was monumentally influential, setting musicians like Bob Dylan down the path to folk fandom. The White House started its own national music library with the Anthology; anyone with more than a passing interest in American roots music should do the same. --Michael Ruby

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Rolling Stone, Dec 11, 2003
Named by Rolling Stone Magazine as one of the 500 GREATEST albums of all-time!

Customer Reviews

Mysterious, Beautiful and a Kick Inside
I half heard a story about the Anthology on Natl Public Radio a few months ago while I was getting ready for work. The story kept coming back to me, until I had to buy the Anthology to get some peace. Instead of peace, I find that I am now disturbed, intrigued, and haunted.

Music is ill-suited to being described in words, so I'll use an entirely different experience to try and convey what listening to this Anthology is like.

I once knew a fellow who had grown up on Bechtel construction project sites around the world. As a kid playing in the dirt at these sites, he'd collected a box full of those stone tools that humans made and used for something like three million years. I found that once I had turned one of these slips of chipped obsidian or shale over for a moment, it settled naturally into my hand. There was a spot for my thumb, another spot for my forefinger, and my hand was making a scraping or digging motion with the thing. The tool and my hand still remembered their ancient partnership, without any volition from me. This sensation was simultaneously disturbing and satisfying and made the hair stand up on my neck.

This sensation is very close to what I feel listening to this anthology. You will not hear the familiar, highly produced music we're now so comfortable with. You will hear the voice and sound of music as it has been for millions of years -- and you will recognize what you are hearing as being utterly, essentially human.

These recordings were, of course, made only 75 years ago in the 1920's, surely part of the modern era. Yet this was the last moment in time between the old world and the new world. We still sing and play music for the same reasons we always have, but the way we used our voices and instruments for millions of years has been changed by technology. So if these not very old recordings feel strangely like a link to something ancient and mysterious, that's because they actually are.

There is a great beauty in the voices on these recordings, many of which are almost shrill, almost off-key -- unfamiliar to our pampered contemporary ears -- but also perfectly right. There is a mystery in the odd and sometimes fragmentary lyrics, whose once important meaning is now lost.

We can still share the depth of feeling through the music itself, sometimes so strongly that your heart leaps as though you'd been kicked from inside. But, as it says in the booklet of notes, while we can share in the emotions that impelled someone to sing about The Coo Coo Bird in the first place, we'll never know why it was important to live on a mountainside in order to see Willie go by.

Perhaps the true power of this Anthology is that every recording is genuine in a way that is no longer possible. I recommend it.

The first great collection of American folk song recordings
The "Anthology of American Folk Music" put together by Harry Smith was originally issued in 1952 in three volumes of 2 LPs each, with a total of 84 tracks collected from old records. It is said that this collection played a seminal role in the folk music revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s, influencing and inspiring the generation of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. Once you listen to these songs you will have little doubt that was indeed the case. The three volumes focus on Ballads, Social Music, and Songs respectively. I did not recognize enough of these 84 songs to use all of the fingers on my guitar picking hand and I could not care less. You can look over the playlist above and see if anything looks familiar, but, obviously, that is beside the point here. These songs involve a definition of "folk" that is expansive enough to include blues singers like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Richard "Rabbit" Brown. The authenticity of these songs is overpowering, transporting you to a time and place when radio was just starting to make inroads into the backwoods of America.

The collection includes a 100-page booklet that features harry Smith's original handbook of songs, an essay by critic Greil Marcus, along with other essays, song notes, photos, graphics, and recollections by legendary artists about how this anthology inspired their own careers. The overall effect is like taking a college course on American Folk Music. Whether your interest in this type of music comes from listening to the Weavers, Peter Paul, & Mary, or the soundtrack to "Brother, Where Art Thou?" hopefully your enjoyment of folk music will lead you back to this seminal collection. Additional Note: There is also an excellent website put together by the Smithsonian Folkways that will tell you for not only alternate titles (e.g., "The Wagoner's Lad" is also known as "Loving Nancy" and "My Horses Ain't Hungry"), but other recorded versions organized by styles (e.g., traditional American Folk, Folksong revival, Post revival, Country/String Band, Bluegrass, and British). Like everyone else, I have been greatly impressed by the way the Smithsonian Institute has been protecting our nation's heritage when it comes to folk music. They take their job seriously and they are very, very good at it.

Absolutely essential for too many reasons to name here
My review title says it all. Of course, that won't stop me from saying more...

Let's just say I wouldn't trust a musician that did not have at least a passing familiarity with one of the following: 1. The Anthology of American Folk Music; or 2. An artist that appeared on The Anthology of American Folk Music; or 3. At least a few songs from TAAFM.

That said, I feel very strongly that even if you are not a musician, regardless of the style of contemporary music you listen to (and I ravenously devour current music), whether it be Radiohead, Fishbone, Wilco, D'Angelo, Dr. Dre WHATEVER, if you listen to this collection, you will hear the roots of modern music. Somewhere I read a review of TAAFM and it called it a "genetic code" for modern music, which is entirely appropriate.

As a collection of songs and performances, this collection is entertaining, educational, shocking, delightful, scary (try listening to the first few tracks of disc 2-B alone in the dark...) revelatory, essential. As a stand-alone document, The Anthology is a kind of Rosetta Stone, having influenced every aspect of popular music through the years both directly and indirectly (subconsciously, even).

It makes me think that perhaps these songs already exist in everyone's psyche...they are there, but you do not know it until you hear them. The songs are both familiar and strange, and at times some selections seem so fragile and precious, they might crumble if you listen too hard (yet you always do).

And by the way, even if initially you absolutely HATE a FEW selections (and trust me, you will...I did!), they will be internalized nonetheless, and you will subsequently embrace them, and come to love them. Like a blemish on your lover's otherwise perfect breast, they are as much a part of the collection as the selections you love, and just as essential to the whole.

The packaging is perfection, by the way. From the huge book of essays and analysis, to the repro of Harry Smith's original book, to the way they organized the selections on the CD's (resisting the temptation to condense the music onto fewer discs, even though they would have fit), it is all true to Harry's original vision. There could be no more appropriate way to present this material other than what Smithsonian Folkways has done. I have played this for people, and when they ask me to record it for them (and they always do), I steadfastly refuse. Not because I work for RIAA or anything like that, but because a document this grandiose, this important and this properly packaged, should not be trivialized by being disassembled in such a fashion. It needs to be consumed as a harmonious whole to be fully appreciated. It would be like emailing someone a JPG of the Mona Lisa's smile and expecting them to fully dig it and appreciate the whole.

If you have not noticed, I admit that I have acquired a near religious obsession with this collection. Having owned it now for two and a half years, I find myself still seeking any and all information about this remarkable collection.