Harry Smith: Celestial Hobo

Andy Warhol, Screen Test: Harry Smith [ST314], 1964, 16mm film transferred to digital video, black and white, silent; 4 min. The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art
 

By ERIK VOLET March 5, 2024

Harry Everett Smith (May 29, 1923 - November 27, 1991) spent the larger part of his life in the Chelsea Hotel in New York City. He was a polymath whose interests and work extended into the arts, humanities, social sciences and beyond. His interest in creating idiosyncratic models for organising and combining disparate fields of knowledge had much in common with the figure of the ‘Renaissance-man’ or magician of times past. Simultaneously rooted in his own time, Harry Smith was an American Magus of the twentieth century.

In the midst of reading Harry Smith American Magus[1], I discovered that a major exhibition was on in New York titled: Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: the Art of Harry Smith[2].To my knowledge this is the first major museum exhibition devoted to his work that ran from October 4, 2023 to January 28, 2024 at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Installation view, 2024, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: the Art of Harry Smith. Courtesy of The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 

Harry Smith is best known publicly for his three-album[3]Anthology of American Folk Music released in 1952 by Folkways Records for which he was awarded a lifetime achievement award at the Grammy’s in 1991. This compilation of various neglected rarities of American folk music was born of his collecting and archiving of old 78 records.

His inclusion of often highly unusual examples of Hillbilly Music, Bluegrass, African-American Blues, Ragtime, Gospel and Cajun music willfully disregarded the arbitrary boundaries of race and genres commonly imposed at the time. This highly influential project’s importance cannot be overstated, and was attributed by many to have brought about the folk music revival of the 60’s and even to have changed the entire direction of American popular, or vernacular music. 

Harry Smith is also well-known as an avant-garde filmmaker. He began making hand-painted experimental abstract films in the late 40’s. True to his archivist impulse and interest in finding correspondences between separate sets of information he sought in his first films to unite abstract moving forms to the rhythms of bebop music, specifically those of Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk. He was also producing paintings based on his musical notation of the bebop musicians syncopation made while listening to them play at the Five Spot.

Harry Smith, Manteca [Jazz Painting], c. 1948–49, Lightbox transparency from 35mm slide of lost original painting, Illustration of Dizzy Gillespie and His Orchestra, Manteca/Cool Breeze (RCA Victor 20-3023, 1948), 78 rpm, Transparency: 27 5/8 × 21 7/8in. (70.1 × 55.6 cm), Estate of Jordan Belson. Courtesy of The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 

His second grouping of films became more figurative in content generated by a collage process born from collecting paper ephemera which he recombined a la Max Ernst into moving exquisite corpse animations. His friend fellow painter Jordan Belson saw him as “Highly influenced by Surrealism and Dadaism.”[4]

Aside from artistic production both auditory and visual, Harry himself identified as an anthropologist. This approach permeates all his work and is the lens of looking at the world through which we can best understand his activity.

Installation view, 2024, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: the Art of Harry Smith. Courtesy of The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

He did indeed study anthropology briefly at the University of Washington  in 1942, dropping out not long after hearing Woody Guthrie perform in Berkley at the same time as smoking marijuana for the first time. Regardless of his abandonment of academia, he continued to approach his cultural inquiries with an anthropological rigour combined with the subjective idiosyncrasies of a bohemian artist.

Harry Smith for Inkweed Studios, Untitled 3-D Greeting Card [“are you looking for the third dimension?”], 1953, India ink on cardstock Sheet: 5 3/4 × 5 3/4 in. (14.6 cm × 14.6 cm) Estate of Jordan Belson. Courtesy of The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 
 

Installation view, 2024, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: the Art of Harry Smith. Courtesy of The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 

As early as 1943 when Harry was still a teenager he had begun recording the music of the Lummi people. Their traditional territories are in the Puget sound area of the Pacific Northwest region of Washington State not far from Anacortes, where he grew up and was living at the time. Apparently his mother was a schoolteacher on the Lummi Reservation which may have led to his recording of ceremonial songs there.

He later recorded peyote songs of the Kiowa people which was released as The Kiowa Peyote Meeting by Folkways records in 1973.[5] As legend has it he was jailed for being a suspicious character in Anadarko, Oklahoma and there he met some Kiowa people who connected him to those who knew peyote songs.

It is important to show that Harry’s interest in studying the folklore of many different peoples was directly and deeply connected to his inherently anti-racist beliefs and practices. The simple fact of his having met in jail the people whose songs he was to record shows that he related to them as equals. Here I provide a few quotations from his experience to illustrate this:

“I would like to make it clear that of the people I later worked with, none were met in the jail; the unfortunate victims of that place only provided the contacts.”[6] And further: “Except for the police, white people are unique in the Anadarko city jail. This is not because whites are rare in Anadarko, far from it, but because, like the rest of that town, the jail is supported by exploiting the owners of the land; and so, the police arrest few but Indians.”[7]And finally: “For the Kiowa, like most other North American Indians, had no nations; no government in the sense that we intruders understand these terms.”[8]

Harry Smith, Algo Bueno [Jazz Painting], c. 1948–49, Lightbox transparency from 35mm slide of lost original painting, Illustration of Dizzy Gillespie and His Orchestra, Algo Bueno/Ool-Ya-Koo, B-side (RCA Victor 20-3186, 1948), 78 rpm Transparency: 27 7/8 x 28 in. (55.6 x 71.1 cm) Estate of Jordan Belson. Courtesy of The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 
 

Harry Smith, Untitled [Demoniac self-portrait], c. 1952, India ink on cardstock, sheet: 8 1/2 × 5 1/2 in. (21.6 × 14 cm), Lionel Ziprin Archive, New York. Courtesy of The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 

These statements make abundantly clear his solidarity with the Kiowa people specifically and with oppressed people in general, evidence of which can be seen in all his creative output. 

The continuing relevance of Harry Smith to the arts and to all creative endeavours is born of his ability for “bridging boundaries”[9]. He was a modern day alchemist who was able to bring together seemingly separate elements such as the ‘low’ culture of folk music with the so-called ‘high’ culture represented by abstract or modern art.

He had the ability to track the zeitgeist and predict cultural tendencies. According to John Cohen: “To my mind the Anthology anticipated the popular Rock & Roll music that followed.”[10]Harry himself confirms this interpretation: “That’s what I was trying to do because I thought that is what this type of folk music would lead to. I felt social changes would result from it.”[11]

Reiterating this Ed Sanders weighed in: “The magical intent of the 1952 Anthology had, in its way, impacted a nation for the good. Plato was right, music can change the direction of a civilization, for worse or better.”[12]

Harry Smith was a witness, archivist and key participant in the unfolding of twentieth century culture, in his own words: “The object is to record.”[13] WM