Anthology of American Folk Music and Working-Class Music‪.‬

HARRY SMITH'S Anthology of American Folk Music, reissued with additional notes by Smithsonian Folkways in 1997, is an award winning (Grammies for Best Historical Album and Best Album Notes) 6-CD documentary sound recording set from America's intellectual and artistic past. It uses as its primary materials recordings originally made by and for working-class people. When Harry Smith created the Anthology in 1952 he constructed a document for middle-class popular culture. Originally published by Folkways Records of New York as three two-LP boxed sets, it became an icon of the American folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s. No folksong intellectual of that era was more influenced by the Anthology than the late Ralph Rinzler, the man who brought Folkways to America's national museum, the Smithsonian. Hired as a field researcher for the Newport Folk Festival in 1964, Rinzler tracked down performers like those who had made the sounds on the Anthology, recording them and bringing them to the Festival. In the late 1960s Rinzler, disaffected with the commercialism of Newport and the folk scene, sold the Smithsonian on his idea for a Festival of American Folklife (FAF). Originally planned as an annual event building to the 1976 Bicentennial, it proved a tremendous success and remains a popular summer fixture in Washington. Just as Marius Barbeau's popular books and lectures on folklore and music led to the creation of a separate division -- now the Canadian Centre for Folk Culture Studies -- at the National Museum, Rinzler's success with the FAF led to a permanent Office of Folklife Programs at the Smithsonian. When Folkways owner Moe Asch died in 1986, Rinzler had the vision and influence to bring the company with its amazing catalog to the Smithsonian.