Time Done Been Won't Be No More

by William Gay

  In an essay on the Anthology called Smith’s Memory Theater, Robert Cantwell wrote, Listen to I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground again and again. Learn to play the banjo, and sing it yourself over and over again, study every printed version, give up your career and maybe your family, and you will not fathom it.

  Harry Smith was an American Original, as bizarre and one of a kind as the songs he struggled to preserve, and he seemed to veer back and forth between madness and a kind of incomprehensible genius.

  The diverging path Smith followed all his life was staked out early. He was born in Oregon in 1923 to theosophical parents who dabbled in Freemasonry and the occult. His father once gave him an entire blacksmith shop as a birthday present, ordered Smith to learn alchemy and begin transmuting base metals into gold. Smith seems to have spent a number of years trying to accomplish this, but he was impoverished all his life so it’s apparent he never did.

  He said on several occasions that there was a strong possibility that he had been fathered by Aleister Crowley, an infamous black magic occultist who could, it was said, conjure demons and cast spells, but Smith was a mysterious, a man who was no stranger to masks and playing roles, and everything he ever said about himself had a quality of ambiguity to it.

  Most of Smith’s life was spent on the move, in pursuit of art. Smith’s definition of art seems to be whatever he wanted it to be, and some of his obsessions were abstract to say the least: string figures, making hand-painted films that were by all accounts exquisite, recording sounds on tape (including the music of Native American dances), ceremonial Easter eggs, paper airplanes—the list goes on.

  Smith told a story about spending three days with Maybelle Carter, photographing a collection of patchwork quilts that she had, trying again to correlate color and sound, searching through Carter Family songs and quilts, trying to group the particular song with its matching quilt. One can only conjecture what Carter thought Smith was doing.

  Smith was a sometime panhandler who was proud of his ability to live by his wits. He was a mesmerizing talker who managed to draw others into his visions, but he wasn’t all talk. He was an intelligent man with a broad field of knowledge, some of it admittedly peculiar, and his mind seemed to make intuitive leaps, A to D without stopping at B and C, and he always knew what he was going on about even when he couldn’t communicate it to others.

  Smith lived always in a sort of impoverished Bohemia, first in the North Beach poets’ area of San Francisco, then in Greenwich Village, then in the Chelsea Hotel in New York City. When the Beatnik movement arrived, it seemed to have been conceived exclusively with Smith in mind. For years he dwelt on its fringes. Allen Ginsberg put him up for a while, and Smith did the art for a volume of Ginsberg’s poetry.

  Essentially, though, he lived wherever he could get a roof over his head, preferably one large enough to cover the vast collection of things he was amassing. John Cohen interviewed him for a 1968 issue of Sing Out!

  Here’s what Cohen saw when he came through the door:

  The closet is filled with dresses from the Florida Seminole Indians. One corner of the room, marked with KEEP OUT signs, is filled with Ukrainian Easter eggs; on the bureau are stacks of mounted string figures; behind them is a movie camera alongside portfolios of his paintings and graphic work. In another corner is a clay model of a landscape which was recreated from a dream, piles of beautiful quilts and other weavings, as well as a collection of paper airplanes from the streets of New York. Small file cabinets of index cards are distributed between the pages of research books. Each book becomes more exotic by its juxtaposition with other such books, Mayan codices beside Eskimo anthropology studies under a collection of Peyote ceremonial paintings, etc., etc.

  He once lost a huge part of his collection when he was evicted from a New York hotel; the landlord simply had it hauled away. But Smith had shifting interests, and he had grown adept at starting over.

  All this time he had also been collecting phonograph records, anything that struck him as odd or different. These were mostly rural and what were then called race records. At one time he claimed to have owned a hundred thousand of them. He had always been obsessed with sound, but he said that his primary interest in recording was the technology of it; he was staggered by the idea that you could take what had always been an oral tradition and market it out of a Sears and Roebuck.

  Always broke, Smith contracted with Moses Asch of Folkways Records to unload part of his collection. Then the deal was amended. A record assembled from his 78s would be issued, and Smith himself would compile it. It would turn out to be his major work of art.

  As Cantwell wrote, Smith was creating a sort of memory theater, a mnemonic library, a primitive thinking machine that would, in Smith’s words, program the mind.

  The idea of a memory theater is one that fascinated Elizabethan England: an arena containing the entire cosmos of knowledge categorized by its cabalistic, astrological, and alchemical symbols, where scholars could enter at will and rummage through or pore over manuscripts. Smith never quite got away from alchemy.

  In the beginning it sounds like most generic folk collections: Appalachian reworkings of English ballads, some reels and dance tunes, songs about house carpenters, errant wives, wagoner’s lads. Performers like Uncle Eck Dunford, Buell Kazee. But entering Smith’s world is like progressing down a carnival midway past the kiddie rides and Ferris wheels until you notice that the sideshows have grown stranger and stranger, that the barker’s spiel has turned ambiguous, and that his features are stamped with sinister intent.

  Deeper in the Anthology, things have changed. The songs are no longer child ballads or rustic reels or cautionary fables, and they are no longer distanced or detached but have become modal ballads that inextricably link singer and song. We have entered a realm where the words mean more than what they say because the performance is part of what is being said. The teller can no longer separate himself from the tale; they have merged to form something larger than both.

  Some of the songs start out as if they were going to be straightforward renderings of actual events, then progress to ironic asides on these events, then to biographical tidbits about the singer himself. Furry Lewis’s 1927 recording of Kassie Blues is one example. Originally released as Part one and Part Two and encompassing both sides of a 78 rpm record, it begins with an account of Kassie Jones, the fabled brave engineer. Then abruptly we’re out of Jones’s world and into Furry’s, caught up in Furry’s troubles with the law for bootlegging, with the woman who, when the police chase him to her door, bids him to her bed; then a jumpshot forward to Jones’s children crying on a doorstep, comforted by a mother who assures them that the imminent pension is compensation enough for a father killed on the Southern Line.

  In Part Two the guitar is more driving and urgent, and we’re back with Jones, in his last minutes. The train’s water is low, Jones’s watch is slow, and he’s bound for an appointment with a passenger train in a mythic non-future. All this tied together by a refrain that is sort of bluesman’s ethos that has little to do with either a real or fictitious Casey/Kassie Jones. It’s Furry, not Jones, who says of himself:

  I get it written on the back of my shirt

  I’m a natural-born easeman don’t have to work.

  In the third volume, titled simply songs, we are in the dark heart of Smith’s concept. At first the songs seem to have no connection with one another and are as disparate as the singers who sing them: Mississippi John Hurt, Rabbit Brown, the Carter Family, Dock Boggs. (Boggs’s voice here sounds so dissociated it seems to be coming not just from some other time but from outside time itself, from beyond the pale, a voice half-filtered through a mouthful of graveyard dirt.) The music, especially the flailing banjos of Boggs and Macon, has a wild energy that is at once hedonistic and nihilistic so that the singer seems to be propelling himself headlong into oblivion, casting aside all the things you accumulate in life so that in the end there is nothing left but the energy itself. Kill yo
urself! Macon yells in Way Down the Plank Road, and you don’t know if he’s talking to the audience or himself, but it scarcely seems to matter: Heaven’s been abandoned, and Hell’s too far away to worry about yet, and all that matters is rolling down the line.

  The cumulative effect of the tracks reminds you of an old newspaper blown down an alley in the French Quarter, revealing first one headline then another, documenting a world that is at best uncaring, at worst absolutely malevolent. Bad things happen within these pages, grainy black-and-white images flicker past and are gone. Children starve or freeze or are murdered, lovers betray and kill each other or remain faithful and die anyway, trains seem always to crash instead of reaching their destinations, assassinated presidents are in coffins taking their rest, the Titanic hits the iceberg (Wasn’t it sad when that great ship went down? the singer asks sardonically). When farms fail in three successive songs, Smith seems to be making some gleeful point.

  You marvel about the ability to laugh in death’s face, to make jokes about starvation and joblessness and sadistic bosses and the chain gang, yet time and again you hear in these voices and words a dark stoicism. Perhaps only Uncle Dave Macon could have written a song about hard times and named it Wreck of the Tennessee Gravy Train. Maybe that’s a Southern trait; more likely it’s a just human one.

  The most dissonant note is struck by the song Smith chose to place next to last, Ken Maynard’s rendering of The Lone Star Trail, a stilted and clumsy pastoral that reminds you of the sound track to a bad 1940s Western, with Maynard singing nasally of rolling prairies and lowing cattle and smiling ranch foremen and the sweetest girl in the world. Placed anywhere else it could be an almost pleasant reverie, but taken in the context of what has gone before all those murders and dislocations and gone lovers and prison sentences, all underpinned with those sliding blues guitars it’s as out of place as a court jester at a funeral, and the ear is unprepared for such a sentimental vision of life. Perhaps Smith saw it as a joke; more likely he meant it to serve as a sort of pause, a screen saver, a time to consider the tale you have been told about a lost America, a kind of bookmark to set all this apart from the final song.

  This is Henry Thomas’s “Fishing Blues”, set to panpipes that sound older than America, older than anything. The sound is liberating, freewheeling, with an undercurrent of mystery not communicated by the words. On the surface it’s just a song about getting a line and bait and a pole and going down to the fishing hole and catching a catfish, bringing it home, and frying it up. Baits and lines and poles normally have a sexual symbolism in blues; the fish is a sometime signifier for female sexuality. But there’s nothing overt in the song, no innuendo in Thomas’s voice, which makes the song stranger still. You notice not what is present but what is absent, Smith was well aware that the fish also represented spirituality, and it acquires this meaning only in the context that Smith has placed it in.

  After repeated listenings you realize that Smith’s genius was not only in selection but in placement, and that he had made a collage or crazy quilt of music in which everything matters, an impressionistic painting where every brushstroke counts.

  In 1988 Smith became Shaman-in-Residence at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and longtime friend Rani Singh began the enormous task of gathering together the Harry Smith Archives, assembling his legacy, and sifting through the complicated and unlikely life Smith had led. A grant from the Grateful Dead’s Rex Foundation allowed Smith to live the last few years of his life in a productive and, for Smith, relatively stable manner.

  After the Anthology was reissued on CD, Smith received a Grammy in 1991 for lifetime achievement. Smith would die later that year, but ascending the steps to the stage in a tuxedo must have seemed to him a transcendent moment.

  I’m glad to say that my dreams came true, he told the audience. I lived to see the world changed through music.

  He was eulogized at his memorial by the likes of Dave Van Ronk and Ed Sanders of the Fugs, but the memorial that will always be around is the Anthology itself. Smith had set out to document the past, but in the end it seems not a replica but the living past itself.

  YOU WOULDN’T STEAL THIS RECORD, Greil Marcus wrote famously in a review, establishing once and for all the criteria by which greatness is judged. A great record is one you’d steal if you couldn’t get it any other way.

  People steal David Johansen and the Harry Smiths. In less than a year I’ve lost eight or ten copies. I’ll take the jewel box down from the shelf, and it’s empty. It was there a week ago. I’ll loan a copy to a friend, and another friend will take it from him. Either the disc contains some marvelous new encoding that causes it to vanish after an arbitrary number of plays, or once they hear it, people just have to possess this record.

  It was at the University of Minnesota that I first heard about the Johansen record. A professor of American literature was talking about Harry Smith and his folk anthology. You’ve got to hear this album by David Johansen and the Harry Smiths, the professor said.

  This seemed something of a non sequitur. I thought of the New York Dolls. I thought of Buster Poindexter. I don’t think so, I said.

  But he wouldn’t have it. He was a convert, a true believer. He was washed in the blood. He drove us across Minneapolis to a record shop called the Electric Foetus.

  Got that new David Johansen? he asked a clerk.

  Right over there, the clerk said, pointing, as if an unknown record on an unknown label was as common as locating a loaf of bread in a convenience store. The professor paid for the record and handed it to me, a faintly superior expression on his face as if he knew something I didn’t.

  He did.

  From the first notes of the first song it was apparent this wasn’t a mere tribute album. I recalled Elvis Presley being quoted as saying: I don’t sound like nobody. There was an almost eerie connection to Rabbit Brown, whose song “James Alley Blues” is covered, but Johansen didn’t sound like nobody either.

  They sit regarding you from a black-and-white photo on the cover of their first album, The New York Dolls, with expressions that vary from simpers to cold stares. The five young men seated on the sofa are dressed in what looks like thrift-shop hooker garb, and they are pancaked and rouged and lipsticked, the square root of decadence. David Johansen is the one in the middle: huge, dark bouffant and platform shoes, mouth a painted Cupid’s bow.

  Over all, the photograph is a sneer, an upraised middle finger that says, I don’t give a goddamn what you think. They’re going the Stones one better, not androgynous like Bowie or effeminate like Elton John but into some whole new territory. All in all they look just the way David Johansen says he wanted them to look: sixteen and bored shitless.

  This is all geared to shock, or at least it was in 1973, when the album was released. The Dolls need to be taken in the context of 1973: the Eagles are flying over Hotel California, Bruce Springsteen was gearing himself up to be the future of rock n’ roll, his Time and Newsweek covers already on the horizon. The Dolls even shocked New York a little, very briefly. New York is notoriously hard to shock.

  The music on the album is the aural equivalent of the cover, defiant and clarifying, an inside joke that says, There’s something happening here, and we don’t care if you know what it is or not. Flailing guitars and drums and an out-of-step bass kick in at ninety miles an hour and then accelerate in little two-minute concertos that sound like the early Stones bereft of all restraints and social concerns and literary pretensions. They sound like elevated trains and car collisions in which folks perish the neon cacophony of New York at night, the world ending not with a whimper but in a bedlam of rending crashes.

  Johansen says the idea of the Dolls was to take music away from the recording studios and give it back to the kids, to make a sort of homemade music that anyone could do. That’s a valid idea; a kid can’t go out to the garage with three chords and a guitar and come up with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band or Smiley Smile. The New York Dolls
put it within reach, and at the same time added the kick of rebellion that has fueled rock since the days of Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard.

  For a giddy moment in the early 70s, the New York Dolls were at the cutting edge of rock music. Pursued by record companies and lionized by the Gotham underground and the rock critic literati simultaneously, Johansen and the Dolls seemed on the verge of stardom. They even fell in with a London fashion designer named Malcolm McLauren. He wanted to take them to England and outfit them in red patent leather. When the project fell through, McLauren returned to his native land and invented the Sex Pistols.

  The Dolls recorded two albums. Neither sold very well, but they altered forever the idea of what a rock band could look and sound like. The Dolls were gone as suddenly as if they’d self-combusted. They left the field to imitators like Kiss, who refined the idea of dressing up and went on to make millions.

  Johansen resurfaced as a solo singer-songwriter in the early 80s. His songwriting had improved, and his gruff post-Dylan voice stood out from the other folkies, but these records didn’t do much either, though they did manage to build on the cult audience of fans and critics he’d carried away from the Dolls. Then he reinvented himself once again. This time the mask was that of Buster Poindexter, a pompadoured lounge singer performing with a swing band. Though Johansen had never followed trends, just his own interests and obsessions, this time they coincided with popular taste. Buster Poindexter struck a chord with the audience somehow, and the persona lives on to this day, when, almost by popular demand, Johansen resurrects Buster at clubs or private parties.