The godfather of American avant-garde cinema, Jonas Mekas, said: “For years, Harry Smith has been a black and terrible legend, and also a source of strange rumors. Some even stated that he had left this planet long ago; the last alchemist in the Western world, the last magician."

Passionate about jazz and folk, John Szwed was 26 when he read those words from Jonas Mekas in the Village Voice publication. Szwed already knew Harry Smith through his music teachers, but the statements read in the magazine burned his memory. Today, in addition to a professor at the University of Yale, he is also a prestigious Szwed biographer, who compiles in his books stories about the lives of the ethnomusician alan Lomax and the jazz musicians Miles Davis, Billie Holiday and Sun Ra, among others. Cosmic Schollar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith Harry Smith's life and times) published his biography in September 2023, coinciding with the 100th anniversary of Smith's birth.

Book on jazz musician Sun Ra Space Is The Place: The Lives And Times Of Sun Ra (Space is the place: The life and time of Sun Ra) and the artist Harry Smith have been sold stabbed, and have aroused curiosity and expectation towards the two artists. Szwedi read: “There are some similarities between Sun Ra and Harry Smith: both were the only ones, they lived a lot and created a mythology in themselves. Both were almost unknown in much of his career. They gave their lives and often risked their lives, for the art they knew they were likely to receive little recognition.”

Although both have been made public, Smith’s theme is more prominent.

Who was Harry Smith?
Painter, filmmaker, folklorist, musicologist, anthropologist, beat poet, jazz expert, wizard, alchemist... and, among other curiosities, Smith was also a collector: He collected over 30,000 Ukrainian Easter eggs.

He was a radical nonconformist. He developed all his activity far from the apathy of institutions, Galerists and capitalism, so he lived without money, showing the appearance and the ways of a beggar. In fact, one of the great enigmas generated around this polyhedral and conflictive personality is how he managed to live in New York for 36 years with hardly any money. Its production includes paintings, films, poems, music and sound recordings, but it also includes large collections of iconic objects such as uncovered strings and paper planes.

Smith’s most well-known work is undoubtedly the Anthology of American Folk Music collection, which has become a cult work among many musicians and listeners since its first publication in 1952.

According to the biography written by Szwed, “most people knew it from the collection of those old recordings (Smith), which changed the trajectory of folk and rock.” According to the prestigious musical critic Greil Marcus, Smith is the access to another more grim and complex history of the United States: “A strange, ancient America.”

The compilation released by the Folkways Records label brings together 84 popular songs collected in six LP that Smith organized into three categories: social music, ballads and songs. “(Smith) understood the contents of the records. He knew his relationship with folk music, his relationship with English literature and his relationship with the world,” explained Moe Asch, co-owner of the Folkways record in 1972. Smith's work is, in addition to an expert, the result of an obsessive and extraordinary intelligence, and his shadow is so great that this collection is considered a historical canon for folk musicians like Bob Dylan, Woodie Guthrie or Joan Baez to become a Bible in the 1960s. In addition, these recordings were a milestone for young Americans to start listening to melodies containing political content. Smith was assisted by musicians and bands such as Dylan himself, Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen, The Fugs or Jefferson Airplane. Many contemporary musicians have expressed their admiration for Smith: Nick Cave, Sonic Youth, Beck and Wilco, among others.

The light and darkness
on the covers of the discs involved in Anthology also bring forth another darker aspect of the collector's thorny personality, his passionate curiosity for the darkest knowledge. Thus, to highlight the magical aspect of music, each cover was printed in a different color and showed a drawing of a celestial monochord – a dultzimel or eardrum of a rope, put in tone by God’s hand – taken from the book De Música Mundana by the alchemist Robert Fludd of 1618.

Despite the obvious curiosity about dark sciences, Smith's wisdom and practice were not only quite terrestrial, but also very varied. However, even though it is not possible to uncover the disciplines on curious characters, it is possible to mention their fields of work and their works, thanks, among other things, to the huge work of John Szwed in his biography. However, Smith's greatest work has been photographed, as many of his works were destroyed by the artist himself, due to a precarious state of mind drunk by drugs and alcohol, or sold his works unconditionally to pay for the rent of his room.

Thus, in terms of painting, he brought to his paintings elements of the natives of the Cabal and the North-West Coast of the United States to contribute to surrealism. In addition, he led the painting to jazz and direct albums; he painted works inspired by the improvisations of Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, etc. He carried out several studies on the culture, philosophy and beliefs of Native Americans: during his adolescence he maintained close relationships with the Lummi tribe, in order to collect his customs, including songs, dances and rituals, in the 1940s.

In the 1950s, he settled in New York and dedicated himself to mysticism, mainly to the works of Kabalan and Aleister Crowley. He also delved into animated films like Film No. 12: Heaven and Earth Magic (1957-62) is a cutting film of black and white catalogs that, they say, needed six hours in duration. But today you can only see one hour, among other things, on Youtube. Biographer Szwed considers that the influence of these animated films is notable in the filmography of British filmmaker Terry Gilliam.

For all this, it is clear that the life of this fascinating and enigmatic creator is a sterile task, but using the words of the experimental filmmaker Andrew Noren that are included in the book Cosmic Scholar, the reader can imagine a fairly reliable portrait of the artist and the magician: “He talked to me about the relationship between Elder Eddas and the ceremonial masks of the Bella Coola tribe, on the coast of Washington State, and how these masks attached to the Seminola fabrics and to the music of Heinrich Biber and J.S. With scores from Bach and poetry from Robert Desnos. It was a whole performance... From the brain, sparks could be seen flying. At first I thought all this was magnificent but absurd, because I didn’t know what he meant, but then I listened more attentively, and it started to seem acceptable and even logical...”