Harry Smith's Cipher

Lately I have been driven by unknown forces to spend all my listening time with the weird-but-compelling (and often frightening) music of early rural America. This is the stuff of Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music. Of course Smith was equally weird-but-compelling; a Theosophist claiming to be the son of Aleister Crowley and Grand Duchess (Czarina) Anastasia Romanov. As an avant garde filmmaker and self-proclaimed (but unschooled) folklorist, Smith unwittingly shaped the course of American popular music in the late 50's and early 60's by producing the musical Rosetta Stone upon which the voices of phantom prophets were indelibly etched in an awkwardly bound collection of six LP's. The 84 songs on these sides dropped Bob Dylan (like a reverse alien abduction) almost fully formed into the death throes of 1960's Greenwich Village (then populated by yet another generation of hip hucksters, tricksters, derelict geniuses, boozy romantics and lost souls not unlike the creators of the sounds preserved in Smith's talismanic grooves). The music of this lost, "old, weird America" (as Greil Marcus calls it) hits me as hard as (and isn't that different really than) Albert Ayler's ("old bicycle horn") Salvation Army band on acid or the speaking-in-tongues funk of Charles Mingus' Wednesday Night Prayer Meetings. In the early days of electricity (and even before), there was music that out-rocked and out-punked all the rockers and punks to come.