American filmmaker, folklorist, occultist, polymath, and — through the six-LP Anthology of American Folk Music he compiled for Folkways in 1952 — the curator whose selection and sequencing of pre-war commercial recordings became the canon from which the postwar folk revival learned its repertoire and its sense of an older American vernacular. Where Lomax recorded in the field, Smith worked from a stack of 78rpm records in his apartment, and made of an act of curation a work of imagination as consequential, in its own way, as any of the records it assembled.
Smith was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1923 and grew up in the Pacific Northwest, where as a teenager he made field recordings of Lummi and other Coast Salish ceremonies — an early sign of the ethnographic seriousness that would underlie his later work. He studied anthropology briefly at the University of Washington, gravitated to Berkeley's bohemian and bebop scene in the mid-1940s (he painted to Dizzy Gillespie's records and made his first abstract films), and by the late 1940s had moved to New York, where he lived for most of the rest of his life — much of it at the Chelsea Hotel — in a state of cultivated bohemian poverty that became part of the legend.
The Anthology of American Folk Music (Folkways, 1952) was assembled from Smith's personal collection of commercial 78s issued between 1927 and 1932 — the brief window between the introduction of electrical recording and the collapse of the country and "race" record markets in the Depression. Eighty-four songs, organized into three two-LP volumes (Ballads, Social Music, Songs), with cryptic, hermetic, allusive notes by Smith himself: Clarence Ashley, Dock Boggs, Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Lemon Jefferson, the Carter Family, Uncle Dave Macon, Charley Patton, the Memphis Jug Band, Cajun fiddlers, sanctified gospel singers. The Anthology did not invent these recordings, but it gathered them into a constellation — race and hillbilly records side by side, sacred and secular interleaved, the deep South and the upper South and Louisiana on a single stage — that proposed an American vernacular as a unified body of work. Greenwich Village in the late 1950s and early 1960s essentially learned from the Anthology: Dylan, Joan Baez, Mike Seeger and the New Lost City Ramblers, John Fahey, Dave Van Ronk all worked from it directly. Greil Marcus's Invisible Republic (1997, reissued as The Old, Weird America) is centrally a meditation on what the Anthology was and what it meant.
The rest of Smith's life was as various as the Anthology was concentrated. He made experimental films from the 1940s through the 1980s — Early Abstractions (1946–57), Heaven and Earth Magic (1957–62), Mahagonny (1970–80) — surrealist, alchemically informed animations that have a permanent place in the American avant-garde film canon. He was a serious student of Aleister Crowley's Thelema and of Kabbalah and gnosticism (he was eventually consecrated a Gnostic Catholic bishop), and his occult interests inform the Anthology itself, whose four-element symbolism on the cover (the Celestial Monochord) is a Hermetic device. He recorded the Kiowa peyote ceremonies in Oklahoma in the early 1960s, producing what remains an important document of Native American religious music. He collected Seminole patchwork textiles, Ukrainian Easter eggs, paper airplanes retrieved from the streets of New York, and string figures from cultures across the world. He died in 1991 at the Chelsea Hotel, two months after receiving a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award for his work as the Anthology's editor.
Smith is on the graph because the Anthology of American Folk Music is one of the few acts of curation whose influence on the subsequent shape of an art form is comparable to the influence of the works it gathered, and because he stands as the indispensable third figure — alongside Lomax and Moe Asch of Folkways — in the chain through which pre-war American vernacular music reached the postwar revival and through it Dylan and after. He is also an instructive case for the graph as a whole: the curator-as-thinker, the compilation as argument, the act of selection and sequencing as a form of intellectual work.