Anthology of American Folk Music

Anthology of American Folk Music was released in 1952 on Moe Asch’s Folkways Records. Harry Smith compiled and edited the wide variety of “old-time music,” “race music,” or folk music from his personal 78s record collection—ranging from popular recordings such as The Carter Family, to obscure tunes from the likes of The Cincinnati Jug Band and the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers. In regards to the selection of songs, Smith, according to Greil Marcus, “restricted himself to the commonly held music of traditional and marginalized American cultures as it was professionally recorded between about ‘1927, when electronic recording made possible accurate music reproduction, and 1932 when the Depression halted folk music sales” (11). By the 1920s, the radio had replaced the phonograph as the main form of home entertainment. “Because phonographs cost less and didn’t require electricity,” writes Neil Rosenberg, “they could be sold more easily to working-class consumers” (35). As a result, record companies began to produce series of “old-time music,” songs such as “Got the Farm Land Blues” by the Carolina Tar Heels, were recorded by working-class musicians and were meant to appeal to working-class taste.
The influence of Smith’s Anthology on the music of Bruce Springsteen begins with Nebraska, though not as obvious as the more “overtly social-minded statement” of 1995s the ghost of tom joad, or the more direct musical folk lineage of the 1998, 2006 We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions. What the Nebraska songs share with Smith’s, besides the stark instrumentation of a singer backed by a lone acoustic guitar, has more to do with a certain tone or mood of stillness. Dave Marsh writes, “the Nebraska demos had the quality of stillness associated with the great Library of Congress folk recordings of the 1930s and 1940s” (348). With the exception of the rockabilly infused “Open All Night,” the tempo of the songs on Nebraska are much more subdued compared to the foot-stomping, hip-slapping folk music on Smith’s Anthology. Though he sees little similarities in “the character’s motives,” Rob Kirkpatrick, referring to an interpretation by Bryan Garman, writes, “‘Johnny 99’ combines the narratives of Julius Daniel’s ‘Ninety Nine Year Blues’ (1927) and Carter Family’s ‘John Hardy Was a Desperate Little Man’ (1930)—both from the Folkways Anthology that Springsteen had been delving into at the time” (86). What Springsteen drew upon from songs such as Julius Daniel’s and Mississippi John Hurt’s “Frankie,” were tales of common people situated on the edge of society; at times committing violent acts of revenge and retribution; and yet, even when standing before a judge, they remain defiant and unremorseful, similar to the voice of Starkweather in Springsteen’s “Nebraska.”