Collection Title:
Harry Smith Library Collection
Collection Number:
2019-038
Collection Guide Prepared By:
Mark Davidson, Stephanie Stewart
Collection Date Range:
1862-1992 [bulk 1950-1991]
Collection Extent:
4,200 volumes, 1,100 LPs
Collection Provenance:
American Song Archives (ASA) acquired the Harry Smith Library Collection from Rani Singh and the Harry Smith Archives in 2019 and the collection was physically transferred to ASA in 2020.
Biographical Sketch:
Harry Everett Smith (1923 – 1991)
Born on May 29, 1923, in Portland, Oregon, Harry Everett Smith was a filmmaker, artist, collector, musicologist, and mystic whose restless creativity defied categorization. Raised in the Pacific Northwest, he documented the songs, rituals, and languages of Coast Salish peoples and maintained lifelong ties to Indigenous culture. A descendant of Oklahoma schoolteachers and spiritualists, Smith drew on his eclectic heritage in a career that bridged art and anthropology. In the 1940s and 1950s, he emerged as a central figure among New York’s avant-garde, producing hand-painted abstract films such as Early Abstractions (1946-1957), the feature-length collage film Heaven and Earth Magic (1957-1962), and his ambitious interpretation of Brecht and Weill’s Mahagonny (1970), a cinematic assemblage of found imagery and American iconography.
Harry Smith’s lifelong collecting filled his apartments with thousands of 78 rpm records, paper airplanes found on New York sidewalks, Ukrainian Easter eggs, string figures from around the world, and other fragments of cultural ritual. His vast personal archives reveal a mind devoted to pattern and transformation. His landmark Anthology of American Folk Music (1952) revived forgotten Depression-era recordings, profoundly shaping the 1960s folk revival and cementing Smith’s reputation as a visionary curator of American vernacular culture.
Scope and Contents:
The Harry Smith Library Collection consists of approximately 1,100 LPs and 4,200 books, periodicals, and pamphlets. The library contains numerous volumes devoted to anthropology, art, astrology, astronomy, folklore, literature, math, music, the occult, religion, science, and spirituality. Subjects range from Tibetan Buddhist chants, Kazak Folk Art Designs, and Native American traditions to NASA and psychotherapy. Musical genres among the LP holdings include blues, classical, flamenco, folk, gospel, indigenous music, and regional music from across the United States and around the world, as well as ethnographic field recordings.
Related Materials:
Harry Smith papers at Getty Research Institute Special Collections
Other Harry Smith materials are held at Smithsonian Folkways, the Anthology Film Archives, and with private collectors
Processing Information:
Collection is currently being processed
Collection Use Restrictions:
Copyright is retained by the creators of materials in this collection, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.
