Cosmic Scholar

June 1, 2023
An overdue, comprehensive biography of a strange, singular man. Harry Smith (1923-1991) was a polymath who "effaced, erased, or trashed most of the facts of his life, as he did his art." Nonetheless, Szwed, piece by obscure piece, masterfully puts his puzzle of a life together. Smith was born in Portland, Oregon, and raised in Washington in an unusual family and isolated childhood, and Szwed, biographer of Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, and Alan Lomax, admits Smith's past is rather murky. He was frail, precocious, and fascinated by the local Indigenous population, and he began photographing, filming, and making recordings of them. At 18, he began an ambitious dictionary of Samish and Swinomish languages and began his lifelong obsession with string figures and, much later, paper planes. He was painting, drawing, reading widely, watching movies, and collecting many records, especially folk and blues. Smith spent the mid-1940s in the Bay Area soaking up its rich cultural and artistic milieu--and drugs. By 27, he discovered nonobjective hand-drawn animated film and visual music, his surrealistic "record paintings." A job at the San Francisco Museum of Art's cinema program enabled him to hone his prodigious skills. In the late '40s, invariably broke, he taught a course on Afro-American music and started friendships with poet Jack Spicer and musicians like Gillespie, Monk, and Mingus. Smith's experiments with light shows earned him much-needed financial support from the Guggenheim Foundation. After he moved to New York City in 1951, his mythic reputation grew. Szwed ably describes the substantial impact that Smith's momentous Anthology of American Folk Music had on folk singers, and he offers telling looks at many of the people Smith came to know, like Allen Ginsberg, whom itinerant Smith stayed with. The author is clearly impressed with Smith's accomplishments, especially his experimental animated film work, which filmmaker Jonas Mekas called "magic." Smith was more sage than scholar, and his peaks-and-valleys life was one of a kind. A revelatory portrait of a unique pop-culture figure.

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Starred review from July 1, 2023

The Fugs played at Harry Smith's (1923-91) memorial service; speakers included Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg, Dave Van Ronk, poets, film scholars, a psychiatrist, and an archivist from the Smithsonian. But who was Harry Smith? Award-winning biographer Szwed's (Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth) newest book shows that Smith was--sometimes all at the same time--a painter, filmmaker, record collector and recorder, anthropologist, UFO/parapsychology enthusiast, habitual drug user, and, near the end of his life, Neo-Gnostic bishop. Smith also edited the classic six-volume Anthology of American Folk Music, which was drawn from his own collection of recordings. He's portrayed in this book as someone who lived on the cheap and who often mooched off others to fund his projects. When he died, he left behind 120 boxes of books and records. Going through them is like entering Borges's Library of Babel: anything may be there but how does one find it? Szwed is the ideal chronicler for a person worth knowing but so hard to pin down. VERDICT Szwed, as lively a writer as he is scrupulous, has produced an excellent and engaging biography, the story of an elusive but important and utterly fascinating figure.--David Keymer

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Starred review from August 7, 2023
In this vividly detailed biography, music scholar Szwed (Billie Holiday) brilliantly captures the life and legacy of the enigmatic filmmaker, folklorist, painter, producer, anthropologist, archivist, Kabbalist, and alchemist Harry Smith (1923–1991). Gathering information about Smith’s “scattered” life from incomplete archives (much was lost during Smith’s stints living on the streets), Szwed paints his subject as an influential force in American art, admired by the likes of Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, and Allen Ginsberg. Smith’s work elided boundaries between folk and fine art; his landmark 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, a six-LP collection of rediscovered commercial recordings, was instrumental “to the folk music revival,” while several of his films, including Heaven and Earth Magic (1957) and Mahagonny (1980), were featured in the Museum of Modern Art and the Louvre. Despite his influence, he died destitute, of cardiac arrest, in a Manhattan hotel room in 1991, the same year he won a Chairman’s Merit Award Grammy with Harry Belafonte. Drawing on extensive research to fill in his subject’s emotional states, Szwed sensitively renders the extraordinary, bizarre, and ultimately tragic life that Smith “devoted... completely to art, in some ways turning into a work of art, his own personal surrealism.” The result is a masterful ode to a “strange and singular character” in American arts.

Starred review from June 1, 2023
Harry Smith (1923-91) was "a sickly, undersized, severely near-sighted . . . lonely boy with social problems" in Portland, Oregon, but he was also a prodigy whose deep accord with Indigenous peoples launched a wildly unconventional life steeped in anthropology, the occult, music, art, and filmmaking. A polymath and improviser living from handout to favor, an obsessive collector of books, records, Ukrainian Easter eggs, Seminole textiles, and paper airplanes, Smith made his way to New York and interacted with a dizzying array of innovators, including Thelonious Monk, Patti Smith, Robert Frank, and many more. His Anthology of American Folk Music seeded the folk music revival and he received one of the first Guggenheim grants. Smith's fluency in arcane subjects was torrential and his creativity was volcanic as he made laboriously intricate abstract and animated films and painstakingly composed jazz paintings, all part of his lifelong quest to illuminate the unifying elements found in all cultures. His innovations and visions were enormously influential; his self-destructiveness epic, and his life was saved repeatedly by Allen Ginsberg. Music writer and biographer Szwed confronted both a mammoth and chaotic trove of materials and an even larger void of tragically lost artworks and collections as he assiduously and passionately constructed this engrossing, revelatory, often beyond-belief portrait of a reckless, maddening, cosmic, and transformational genius.

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