Harry Smith

Harry Smith (1923–1991) was an American filmmaker, artist, occultist, and music archivist whose Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), compiled from his private collection of 1920s–30s commercial recordings and released on Folkways, became one of the most influential documents in American music history. The Anthology — 84 tracks of blues, ballads, country, and sacred music — provided the foundational vocabulary for the 1960s folk revival. Smith was also a painter of abstract films, an anthropologist of string figures, and an obsessive collector. He is a figure at the intersection of American avant-garde art, mysticism, and vernacular music.