PRE-DISCOGS, MAN HAS RECORDS BUT NO MONEY. TRIES TO SELL THEM, GETS RECORD DEAL INSTEAD. CHANGES AMERICAN MUSIC.
While the other kids were playing marbles or collecting Joe DiMaggio baseball cards, Harry Smith was becoming an amateur ethnologist. When the Oregon-born, Washington State-raised son of a cannery family was still a teenager, Smith jury-rigged a cheap recorder to a big battery. He captured the rituals of the Pacific Northwest’s indigenous Salish tribes as best as his crude technology allowed, a little Lomax of the left coast.
In the months to come, he swooned over the rest of his country’s early recorded legacy when, in 1940, a 78 RPM single by Mississippi bluesman Tommy McClennan arrived at a record store along the shores of Bellingham. Smith was haunted by that sound, obsessed, hooked. He wanted more of this American folk music. The bombing of Pearl Harbor soon gave it to him.
After the attack, when the United States joined the Allied forces in Europe, old-timers dug out their shellac phonograph records at the military’s command. Some would be melted down for weaponry, others dispatched to entertain “our boys” on faraway bases. Old record warehouses cleared their shelves to make way for fighting supplies. If you could get to it in time, you could amass the entire recorded history of the United States for peanuts.
Smith wasn’t going to war. His bowed skeleton and stooped frame caused by a childhood case of rickets made him unfit for duty. Instead, after moving to the San Francisco Bay in the early ’40s, he went shopping. He bought abandoned troves of “hillbilly and race records” (crassly commercial terms he perpetually resented) and even met Sara Carter—the captivating voice behind the transformational Carter Family country records he adored—a few hours east in a trailer encampment. For a decade, he amassed thousands of records that made their way to California from all points east—“immensely protective of the record collection and greedy about getting more records,” an old chum later described him, with love.
An associate of the emerging Beatnik resistance, Smith was also a burgeoning visual artist, fastidiously illustrating strips of film to run back through a projector; in those early days of LSD research, the results suggested astral phantasms, beyond the limits of reality. Heavyweights like Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk jammed to his work and he to theirs, especially Dizzy Gillespie. He’d make intricate abstract maps of their pieces, hundreds of colorful little curves and geometric artifacts. When German aristocrat and eventual Guggenheim Museum cofounder Hilla Rebay offered him cash to continue this work in New York, he crossed the continent as the innocent ’50s dawned, all conservative and safe and potentially very boring.