(“It sounded strange and I looked for others,” Smith later said of it.) The first one he bought was by Tommy McClellan, a rough-voiced blues singer who recorded in Chicago in the early 1940s. He spent a good chunk of his high school years studying the tribal ceremonies of the Lummi Indians in his hometown of Bellingham, Washington, and started amassing 78s around the same time.

He was born on May 29, 1923, the son of a boat captain and a schoolteacher, theosophists who encouraged his burgeoning interest in ethnography. The arc of his life is both predictable-as if, like a river, it could have only ever led to one place-and meandering. Like most serious collectors, Harry Smith got going early. Has ever come to producing a known cult figure. Smith is about as close as the practice of 78 collecting Whatever the Anthology offers, it’s not revealed quickly. There are times when I have clung to it as a kind of last hope, believing that it’s an object that unlocks other objects there are other times when I have found it solipsistic and nonsensical and inherently ill conceived. Taken as a whole (and that’s the entire point), the Anthology is a wild and instructive portrait of a young country working itself out via song. The Anthology of American Folk Music, which was released by Folkways in 1952 and reissued on CD by the Smithsonian in 1997, was culled exclusively from Smith’s 78 collection and contains only songs issued between 19, that fruitful five-year span between the advent of electrical recording and the apex of the Great Depression.ĭespite its self-imposed parameters, Smith’s anthology is generous in its definition of folk music: child ballads, spirituals, Alabamans playing Hawaiian steel guitar, fiddlers, Charley Patton as the Masked Marvel, Appalachian coal miners, Cajun accordionists, the Carter Family, jug stompers, string bands, church congregations, and Uncle Dave Macon-mouth open, banjo wedged behind his knee, hollering “Kill yourself!”-all appear.

In 1952, a twenty-nine-year-old record collector named Harry Everett Smith squirreled himself away in a two-room office at 111 West Forty-Seventh Street, chewing on peyote buttons and compiling a six-LP compendium for Folkways Records. The chapter details the twisted myths surrounding legendary collector Harry Smith and his Anthology of American Folk Music*, which was recently reissued on vinyl by Mississippi Records.* The following is an excerpt from Pitchfork contributor Amanda Petrusich's new book Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World's Rarest 78rpm Records, which is out now via Scribner.

Value of old 78 records