dusted

Nearly 70 years ago, Harry Smith, through Folkways Records, produced his landmark Anthology of American Folk Music. For the six-record release, Smith curated over 80 tracks from his personal collection of 78s. The process itself, with all of Smith’s idiosyncrasies, drew some attention itself, but the music and the sense of a lost history recovered gave the compilation its power. The Anthology’s  monumental impact on both musicians and scholars continues to this day, and essential part of folk music, Americana and ethnomusicology.  

Smith took his recordings from the A-sides of his vinyl collection, and rounding up the accompanying B-sides became its own sort of avocation for collectors. If the music presented in the original series was this good, this weird, this curious, it would obviously be entertaining and informative to hear all the flip sides, too. Producing such a set makes a clear fit for Dust-to-Digital, and the label (working with collectors John Cohen and Eli Smith) has done just that with The Harry Smith B-Sides. The set comes in a wonderful package with extensive essays and Smith-influenced blurbs on each track, a perfect companion piece for folk fans.  

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Smith set without some conversation focusing outside the recordings themselves. The label made the decision to drop three songs with racist lyrics, a choice made in the context of 2020’s chaos, but with an awareness of balancing various historical and cultural concerns. As we took up our Dusted conversation about the collection, we had plenty of music to listen to, but we also had a number of extracurricular concerns of our own, which only feels appropriate. What is this set? How do we listen or curate? What are the commercial or academic needs here? None of those questions would matter, though, if the music wasn’t just so intriguing, and that’s what drew us in. Our conversation below includes contributions from Bill Meyer, Jonathan Shaw, Justin Cober-Lake, Andrew Forell, and Marc Medwin.

Intro by Justin Cober-Lake

Jonathan Shaw: I confess that I’ve just gotten around to listening to some of this — first 20 songs yesterday.  

You always know, in an abstract way, that folk music like this is full of murder, sex, and suffering. But it’s bracing to hear it in the flesh. Some of the songs are really funny, too. Enjoying it a lot.  

Bill Meyer: This set really hits the listener with all that stuff, doesn’t it? Three songs in and “John Hardy” confronts you with a gun-toting murderer who gets arrested while drunk in a barroom. Since it was released in 1931, which was over a decade into Prohibition, I find myself wondering, did West Virginia even have bars at the time? I suppose a lot of the drinking was done on private property. The song actually relates events that occurred in 1893-1894, nearly four decades prior to the recording.   

One thing I love about this material is the way it projects you back in time and confronts you with what has changed, and what has not. It also gets you thinking about the advance of time. Smith had such a large collection of 78s partly because he was a compulsive collector, but also because the record labels decided to sell off 78s to clear warehouse space for the new LP format. The records included on the anthology were originally released between 1927 and 1932, and they were only about 20 years old when Smith compiled the Anthology of American Folk Music for Folkways Records, (the original idea was hatched by Smith and Folkways’ Moses Asch in 1947, and the three double LPs were released in 1952).   

Skip down a couple more songs, and Buell Kazee “The Wagoner’s Lad” has class differences/prejudices, friction between adolescent hormones and economic realities, and hard truths about the way young women’s fortunes were dictated by others. Harry Smith must have really liked this record, which is back by “The Butcher Boy,” because he included both sides, back to back. While other artists were included in the Anthology more than once, the only other record to have both sides included is the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers’ “Rocky Road” / “Present Joys.” In both cases, The B-Sides simply reverses the songs’ order from the original Anthology of American Folk Music.  

Jonathan Shaw: “The Butcher’s Boy” knocked me out with its gritty gruesomeness. The convenient reading on all the intensity is that the lives of the people who composed the traditional songs — many lost to time — must have also been full of violence and suffering. The experience of working class folk (and peasants, and subsistence farmers, and so on) was certainly full of toil. But it’s also the case that an appetite for violence and darkness has always existed, and culture finds ways of satisfying it. 19th century folk didn’t have horror cinema, but there was a reason that all those Gothic novels and penny dreadfuls sold like crazy.  

Bill Meyer: Whether it’s “The Butcher Boy” or Grand Theft Auto, people like to expose themselves to an acceptable level of titillating violence. Songs like this were proven entertainment, and some of the performers on this box were show biz professionals who understood that material like this pulled and held a crowd.   

Andrew Forell: Then add the Old Testament fire and brimstone to the mix and the nexus of damnation and salvation. If life was brutal, often short and ended by violence whether murder, suicide, work accidents, childbirth or disease the fatalism and stoicism of many of the songs is still tempered with both gimlet eyed persistence and grim humor.  

That Sister Mary Nelson is not messing about.  

Bill Meyer: Should we talk about the New York Times article, including the issues raised by that article about the decision to remove three songs, the attitudes and mores about gender and relationships expressed in the songs (if we removed the songs about men killing women, it would be a shorter record, wouldn’t it? And why did they kill those women? Could it be because they had sex, and the women got pregnant, and abortion was not legal/accessible, and these guys didn’t want to “mess up their lives” like the jocks, frat boys, and other sexually violent individuals of today who similarly ask for a pass on the consequences of being sexually violent?), the musical content and performance styles (ex: I notice that Buell Kazee’s banjo playing is a backdrop that conveys motion and is harmonically congruent with his singing, but aside from that congruence it is not connected to the vocal melody.), what it communicates about things that have changed (ex: what happened to some of those accents? I feel like this music is a window onto a regional America whose differences have been flattened out.) or not.   

And, of course how it relates in structure and intent and content to the original Anthology of American Folk Music, such as what happens to Smith’s organizational strategies [ballads, social music, songs] when you flip all the component records over? How does it change things to go from 6 12” records [and later 6 compact discs] to 4 compact discs? And who is this thing for, and what do we think about that? One thing that I have not yet seen acknowledged in the discussion of removing songs is that Harry Smith, apart from being badly in need of money, really wanted to say some things to mid-20th century America. The Anthology drew upon the records of the 20s and 30s to talk to America of the 50s - what does Dust to Digital have to say in American in 2020? I think that has a lot to do with the decision to NOT REPRODUCE AND DISTRIBUTE (which I think is a bit different from censor, although it is certainly another form of exclusion) certain racist songs.   

Marc Medwin: Loads to discuss here, and I’m even a bit intimidated to enter into a discussion like this, but here goes. For now, I’ll point out, tangentially, that Archeophone, another independent historical label, released a two-disc set of minstrel show reconstructions earlier this year.

I think it’s very well done, not least because of Tim Brooks’ thoroughly researched liner notes, in which, here oversimplified, he compares the minstrel show to Saturday Night Live. I had to think about it for a while, but I take his point. I’m still trying to get my head around which approach is better: Do we sidestep the issue on disc but leave in the commentary, as the Ledbetters did, or do we confront history head-on, as do Archeophone’s Richard Martin and Meagan Hennessy?

Andrew Forell: Having just read the NYT article, I’m also in two minds about this. I can see both sides and agree that racist material is especially problematic in the current climate but thus it was ever so. I will think on this further but if Smith was using material from the 1920s & 1930s to comment on the US of the 1950s, depending on his motives & perspective which I need to read up on some more, is there something to be said about the U.S. in 2020? Is this part of the Ledbetter’s project here? As Bill said there’s also a pile of explicit and alluded to sexual violence in this collection.  Are there differences between this issue in folk music from 1920 and pop(ular) music since 1950? I’m just thinking aloud so please humor me … I’ll consider it more and see if I can put this all more clearly.  

Bill Meyer: I think there’s room for both. Each approach has merits, and each has problems. At The Minstrel Show represents that phenomenon but presenting entire shows and providing supporting information about them. If you want to know what the shows were about, a set like this is where to go, and there’s historical benefit in that. It is aimed for a historically focused niche audience, and it serves a very precise historical purpose. When you’re performing a primarily historical function, you want to clearly represent the history and will be judged according to how you do this. But it also makes the work of people who like old, racist songs and who prefer the CD format easy.   

Dust To Digital aspires to make nice things that can be sold in quantity. In The NY Times article, Lance Ledbetter discussed not wanting to put something out that casual listeners might hear. When you put that much effort into the packaging and presentation, you are putting out something that at a certain level aims to please. Ambushing casual listeners with epithets that begin with the words C and N is displeasing. And while by presenting a collection of songs recorded between 1927-32 the B-Sides presents historical material, it’s actually a really odd sort of historical document. It is relating not just to the history of American music, but the history of records. One uncharitable way to describe it would be “80-odd performances that Harry Smith passed over.” Or, by going ahead and answering the question, “what if you flipped over all the records that made up the Anthology of American Folk Music?”, you could say that it’s a record geek’s mix tape made good. It’s worth noting that while Smith owned all those records, he didn’t include any songs with racist epithets in the Anthology. Clearly, he made a choice not to include them. Dust to Digital started this endeavor from a position of respect for what the Anthology represented; what would the label be doing if it propagated a collection of songs that went against Smith’s proscriptions?  

Both the original Anthology and the B-Sides operate within a cultural milieu. When Smith accepted his life-time Grammy in 1991, he expressed joy at seeing America changed by music. He wanted the USA to recognize some things about itself that were being aggressively whitewashed in the early 1950s. So what does Dust to Digital say to nation now? And what is it listening to when it decides what it wants to say? One concern that has been looked at more closely at the impact of speech on people’s feelings. I grew up in a time when it was deemed important to be exposed to Mark Twain’s writing; now it’s fairly asked, where do you get off requiring people to read something that is upsetting? 

Andrew Forell: I take the point but equally, upsetting things exist and perhaps confronting them head on and dealing with the discomfort is a worthwhile exercise?  

Bill Meyer: I think there is definitely a point to confronting upsetting things and dealing with them head on. And I also think there is something to be said for people deciding when and how they will be so confronted, and having some input into what is deemed an appropriate tool for doing the confronting. The Ledbetters have prioritized the intentional step to refrain from reissuing songs with racist content, which will mark this box as a product of 2020.   

Justin Cober-Lake: This part of the conversation fits in, maybe, with one of the thoughts I’ve been having about the set, and one that I discovered comes up in the liner notes to the set. This box collects the B-sides from the records that made up Smith’s original anthology. The liner essay posits that this fact gives the new set a more uncontrolled sweep — that rather than just seeing the music that the industry in the 1920s and 1930s thought could be marketable, we get a wider range of what people felt like playing. I don’t know if that’s true or not. What I was thinking about listening through was more like: what makes these tracks “B-sides”? When I listen to this music — and I make this division tentatively — I listen about half to enjoy and about half to learn about or be immersed in a somewhat alien world. I’m interested in studying mass culture and how it intersects with American history. So, a set like this raises questions for me about what we actually learn (if anything) about going to the flipside of records.  

To me, removing tracks feels odd because it takes away from the scholarship side of the work. It presents a deliberately sanitized version of the music of the times (assuming we have a representative sample to start with), and it does so explicitly to allow the casual listener the comfort of enjoyable listening. To me, it removes a bit of the time travel element, although I wouldn’t notice the absence of songs I previously didn’t know existed. It makes a statement that this set is to listen to be enjoyed more than to be a work of completion. I’m fine with that idea. If someone wants to listen to old folk music without worrying about skipping tracks (even with all the general or gender-based violence present), that’s fine. It’s funny to me, though, to have a concrete goal collecting all of Smith’s B-sides, and then deliberately not doing so. 

All of which sort of tangentially addresses two topics: 1) to include or not the offensive material; and 2) more interesting to me, what exactly *is* this set? A jukebox? A research accomplishment? A study of history or good background music?

Jonathan Shaw: I’m always in favor of more speech rather than less, especially if the speech is ugly or dangerous. But I have the decided privilege of not finding the triggering words disturbing or troubling to myself, personally. Practically, I want to hear people say what they say, so I can get a handle on who they are. Historically, I want to situate the speech, and hearing as much of it as possible helps with that task. The more effectively I can situate it, the more incisively I can consider slippery stuff, like intent and ideological function.  

Having been involved up close in some of the discussions about Twain's Huck Finn, I can report that much of the discussion I heard was not nuanced, but reactive. The presence of the n-word (ugh, I hate that evasion) in a “white mouth” was enough. Discussion done, with the assumption of moral clarity firmly in place. I can’t get with that.  

It’s also striking that the set features some pretty hair-raising violence performed on women’s bodies, and some strong language about the necessity of accepting Christ as your personal savior or off to hell you go. Someone is going to take offense to that stuff, too–but apparently the feelings of those likely-to-be-offended folks (or, one hopes, the social politics at stake in the determination of offense) don’t pose a problem for the box set’s curators.  

I’m listening for the history, for sure–and for the considerable pleasures provided by the music. Both are rich, complicated. I guess I’d like to have all the complication in front of me, so I can make up my own mind about how to respond.  

Justin Cober-Lake: That’s pretty much where I come down, too, especially given the other potentially offensive material included.   

Bill Meyer: What is this? It is the answer to a big what-if question that has been posed by some record nerds over the years. What was on the other side of all those 78 rpm records that Harry Smith compiled on the original Anthology of American Folk Music? This set answers that question, with three songs out of 84 removed from the playing sequence but discussed in the accompanying book. Even calling them B-sides is a bit of a stretch since I can think of at least two records where Smith included both sides of the record. While I have not check to confirm this, he might have selected the B-sides for inclusion on the original Anthology, so technically some of the songs included might be A-sides. But B-sides has a nice ring to it, right?   

This collection would not exist without Smith’s original work, and its existence is a testament to the enduring influence of that work upon the people who put the set together (as the notes describe, Dust to Digital is just the label that put it out in its current, boxed set form; 78 collectors have circulated versions of this collection of songs for years). It’s a sequel to the Anthology of American Folk Music, with annotation done in self-conscious tribute to Smith’s pseudo-journalistic descriptive style. It is an extension of Smith’s non-academic pursuit of knowledge and things (he didn’t just collect records), and an homage to his idiosyncratic approach to compiling information.  It is not a scholarly document; it is an elegantly executed equation.

Justin Cober-Lake: Oh, I get that, and I think you summarize it very nicely. I guess my question might be more accurately put as something like: What does one do with it? And I imagine your answer would still be similar, but, acknowledging its origins and clear purpose,  how do we receive it? I’m not a collector in that sense. I like the music, and I’m interested in the history. This one has particular resonance because of Smith and the back story (and I will say the physical product is wonderful). But would Dust-to-Digital or the Ledbetters or the other people connected with the project expect of me? I think there are two answers. One is to revel in the completion of the set, to know what’s on the other side of those 78s, and that makes less sense with three tracks removed. The second one is to put it on and enjoy the music. They talk about it playing as the background in a store. That one makes less sense given the violence here; store music is either much more anodyne or deliberately edgy if in an edgy place (I mean, as edgy as an independent record store).  

So, for me, I can’t quite finish the collection. I can’t quite — and wouldn’t want to — use it as background music. I want to start unpacking it. How does this music fit into either/both folk music history or music industry history? If I want to experience the sounds of the late 1920s and early 1930s, what does this set offer that a similar one (if there is a similar one) wouldn’t, aside from the knowing satisfaction of connecting it to Smith?  

None of which, to be clear, means the music isn’t intrinsically enjoyable, in which case I wouldn’t personally feel like raising these questions. And, to be fair, I’m happy to continue think of this from a meta-angle or to pause that at any point and talk about the music itself.  

Bill Meyer: Yeah, this might play in the background at a store, or someone’s house. People put all sorts of non-background sound on and talk over it because they like those sounds in the first place. But I think it does exist to be delved into and listened to intentionally, not accidentally. You don’t accidentally buy a $70 boxed set (although you might randomly get one for Christmas).   

But to turn our attention from what isn’t on the collection to what is, I’ve thought a bit about what does and doesn’t change when you flip Harry Smith’s selections over. Smith was an occult kind of guy, and I think he saw the original Anthology as a multi-level, coded communication. The pacing certain changes when you switch from six LPs with about seven songs each to four CDs with 20-odd songs each. An LP side is a moment; a filled-up CD is a commitment.  

The differences in content aren’t always dramatic. The flip sides of the songs on Volume One: Ballads tend to also be story songs, and they tend towards similar themes — love, murder, and tragedy. But you don’t have to get far to hit a song where it’s evident why Smith didn’t include it. The first is the excised fifth track by Bill & Belle Reed. But Smith’s tolerance for schmaltz screened out stuff like Chubby Parker’s hopelessly sentimental “Down on the Farm.” 

The transition from disc one to disc two isn’t disorienting, since we’re still in ballad territory. And by luck of the draw, disc two has a dynamite starter by street-corner singers William & Versey Smith. “Everyody Help the Boys Come Home” implores listeners to shell out in support of the war effort, which means that its news was already nearly a decade late when it was recorded in 1927. But they sell it so relentlessly that it’s not hard to imagine it being such a crowd-stopper and hat-filler that they would have wanted to keep it in their repertoire.  

But the end of disc two is truly jarring. The 20th track, “Moonshiner’s Dance Part Two” by Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra, is a waltz that sounds so woozily soused that you can imagine advocates for both temperance and tippling using to as an exhibit in support of its cause. Then come two stern sides of Biblical instruction by the Rev. J. M. Gates. While Smith’s sequencing suggested that he saw secular celebration and Christian praise as two sides of the same coin, which is why he had an LP of each in Volume Two: Social Music, he didn’t put them on the same side of a record.  

Random chance works its magic again at the jump from Social Music to Volume Three: Songs, which now takes place in the middle of disc three. The final piece of sacred music, by Rev. D. C. Rice and his Sanctified Congregation, contains a warning in its title, “He’s Got His Eyes On You.” The narrator in Clarence Ashley’s “Dark Holler Blues,” whose unwillingness to countenance the possibility that the object of his desire could ever end up with another man, sounds like he is cruising to become the subject of a murder ballad in the very near term; maybe the fear of God could stay his hand?     

The most radical change, for me, comes near the end of disc two.

Justin Cober-Lake: That end of disc two is just bizarre, for exactly the reasons you describe. The transition into disc three, though, makes sense. “Present Joys” and “Rocky Road” seem to respond to the brimstone preaching with joyful music. I don’t usually think of Sacred Harp singing as this energetic and it opens up the spiritual run with a better tone than Rev. Gates. The run that opens disc three works well and even if “He’s Got His Eyes on You” is meant as a warning, it sounds like a party (and part of the appeal to some and probably the lack of appeal to others is the, shall we say, amateur vocals on this track).  

I kind of laugh that Smith has a whole category that’s just “Songs,” but I also don’t know what else to do without endless subgrouping. The move from banjo-based blues (some of it from the mid-Atlantic but feeling to me like a predecessor of later Mississippi Hill Country stuff) to awkward accordion accompaniment makes for a fun listen, but not exactly a smooth one.   

Jonathan Shaw: I don’t know enough about the regional and historical intricacies of the music and the collections to make much productive critical sense of the transitions. But given my own proclivities, the sharper the contrasts, the more I like them. It would be glib, ridiculously so, to indicate that those sharp contrasts represent something like the inherent weirdness of everyday life. But still, the quotidian is always stranger than we like to think. And more violent.  

I appreciate Justin’s point about the tone of the Rev. Gates songs; ideologically I have little interest in the discourse of the “born again.” (I think Toronto’s Fucked Up have a pretty good line on that…) But man, what performances, by the Rev and his congregation. I especially like the moments at which language falls away, and there’s just the voices, moaning and wailing in overlapping waves. Something gets registered there that exceeds spiritual cant. I sort of love the way the second disc bottoms out there, in that strange intensity. Not sure what sort of coded message that might communicate, but it sure feels a kind of way. Yikes.

Then there’s the shift to the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers, and again, it’s the opening 45 seconds that knock me out, similarly outside of language, just vocalizing something. Almost Pentacostal in their ululations. I can’t get next to the themes, but the sounds are just remarkable, and moving. All of that sets me up for Sister Mary Nelson, and her fellow singers. She’s got an undeniable voice, full of blood and thunder, a hard-won glory. It’s the range of religious ecstasy, over a run of a half-dozen songs.  

Marc Medwin: I can’t stop listening to that Mary Nelson track, blood and thunder for sure, but I’m going to tangent for just a moment. A royal telephone? Technology and its attendant book as archetypal symbols? The past beyond recall and the need for redemption grounded in something in flux, approaching the present? The only other example coming to mind at the moment, and it’s a real stretch, is the “man in the moon” coming “down in a bah-loon!” I guess those polarities we’ve been discussing are deeply embedded, even in humorous ways!

 Justin Cober-Lake: I kind of wonder about that, too, Marc. I think there’s a superficial reading in which technology is shunted aside in favor of religion, but I don’t think that’s it. I think she’s using a relatively new and exciting technology to make an old point. The whole thing sounds ancient to us, but in context, it’s almost like a contemporary sermon illustration, using the then-modern world to help explain a theological point. It only sort of works (the idea of being in the book doesn’t really map between phone book and the book of life), but it makes for a very specific sort of time capsule.  

Jonathan Shaw: Really interesting, Marc and Justin. I wonder how the Mary Nelson track was collected. It sounds relatively more polished, in terms of quality of sound, than the Rev. Gates songs, which sound like they were recorded in a church or worship space of some sort. To what extent was the technology of recording present to these singers? I wonder how its presence framed or otherwise changed the performances.  

Bill Meyer: Symbols and archetypes run deep because that’s what they do. But I also listen to this and I think I’m hearing loose associations related to having to come up with sermons and songs on an ongoing basis. I imagine Sister Nelson sitting at the table, thinking “what’s my metaphor for prayer this week,” and then the lightbulb goes off. “Prayer’s like a telephone to God! This thing’s going to write itself!”  

I’ve never really listened to Toronto’s Fucked Up, what do they say about being born again?   

Marc Medwin: Even more off-topic, but there’s the related question of restoration. Did the same person/people do the restoration work on all these tracks as on the original anthology? Restoration can change the sound quite a lot, but at least we know these recordings are electrical. It would be a fascinating side trip to dig into the participants’ relationships and reactions to technology, not to mention technological reference in these tracks, but it’s beyond the scope of what we’re doing!  

Jonathan Shaw: Marc, it would be a lot to track down, but I’m also provoked by the issue. Some of us romanticize folk as being somehow inherently pre-modern, and hence also “pure” or uncorrupted by the logic of modernity’s markets — for commodities and for culture. But for me, some of the most interesting folk music (and keep in mind that I essentially know squat about the tradition) insists on its modern contexts. Woody Guthrie’s many songs about conflict with industrial processes of production come to mind. So, for sure, all the ways that technology figures in the collection interest me.  

Bill, in Fucked Up’s song “Son the Father,” they sing, “It’s hard enough being born in the first place / Who would ever want to be born again? / It’s taken this long just to get to this place / So what’s the point in ever being born again?" 

Bill Meyer: Regarding restoration, I think the original Anthology was transferred at least twice; first, when the album was compiled, and then again when it was re-released on CD in 1997. Charlie Pilzer did the restoration for the CD edition. Michael Graves did the restorations for the B-sides. The difference between restoration technology and practice in 1997 and 2020 is profound, and one thing that is notable about the B-sides is how little surface noise you hear most of the time.  

You make a good point regarding that coded message, Jonathan. The song apportionment of the B-sides prior to the decision to excise racists songs was 21, 22, 20 and 21 songs. This suggests that it could just as easily been 21, 20, 22, and 21, so why not put Rev. Gates on disc 3 with the other spirituals? Maybe the producers wanted to send a message to those partying Cajuns and moonshiners that preceded him on disc 2.  

My association to this lyric is to remember a line from Peter Gabriel’s song, “Humdrum:” “Out of woman comes a man, spends the rest of his life trying to get back again.”