Various Artists
The Best of Broadside 1962-1988
Smithsonian Folkways
2000

The Band
Music from Big Pink
Capitol
1968

The Band
The Band
Capitol
1969

The Band
Stage Fright
Capitol
1970

The Band
Cahoots
Capitol
1971

In American folklore, we hear a lot about the endless highway: a magical stretch of asphalt with no fixed start or finish; a black ribbon long and wide with possibility. In fact, our musical history, like America itself, is the sum of many roads, a cat's-cradle network of blacktops and alleys, of hard turns and odd detours. In this retrospective feast, those pathways rarely run in a straight line. Harry Smith's collation of pre-World War II blues and hillbilly 78s begets both protest-folk -- the 1960s explosion of baby-boom socialism documented by Broadside magazine -- and the dusty existentialism of the Band's country-rock pioneer fables. An ex-glam-rock singer, David Johansen, reinvents himself as a living toast to Smith's archaeology. But these records also form a full, rich circle, one that begins and always returns to the story of America's birth and bloom, as first told in the blues and ballads of the country's working class.

Smith, who died in 1991 at the age of sixty-eight, was a man of multiple obsessions -- painting, filmmaking, alchemy, American Indian ritual. But his greatest achievement was his Anthology of American Folk Music. Issued in 1952 (and reissued in 1997), Smith's three-volume survey of songs and stories from the dawn of commercial recording became the bible of the 1960s folk revival, a source of repertoire and a bedrock measure of socio-spiritual purity. Smith envisioned the Anthology as an ongoing series, but except for hints he dropped in later interviews, the only surviving evidence of his planned fourth set was a tape that surfaced in the mid-Sixties.

Revenant's lavish two-CD Volume Four, based on that tape, lacks the inspirational shock of the '52 Anthology. Some of the twenty-eight selections, like Robert Johnson's "Last Fair Deal Gone Down" and the Carter Family's "Hello Stranger" (a deceptively sweet song of extreme guilt and sorrow), are familiar from other CD reissues. But Smith was a master of segue. The long roll through Lead Belly's "Packin' Trunk," Joe Williams' "Baby Please Don't Go," the Johnson song, Bukka White's "Parchman Farm Blues" and the holy proto-do-wop of the Heavenly Gospel Singers' "Mean Old World" is a blues opera of men falling in sin, beaten up by circumstance yet certain of salvation. Smith also had a prophet's ear. In the bluegrass heartbreak of the Blue Sky Boys' 1936 version of "Down on the Banks of the Ohio," you hear a narrative tradition of sexual vengeance that still thrives in Eminem. The angular drone of Arthur Smith's fiddle makes "Adieu, False Heart," cut in 1938, rock like the Velvet Underground's "Venus in Furs" in bib overalls.

Politics in folk song, to Harry Smith, was not a missionary thing; Uncle Dave Macon, in his jaunty ode to 1928 Presidential hopeful Al Smith on Volume Four, seems most interested in Smith's promise to repeal Prohibition. To Gordon Friesen and Agnes "Sis" Cunningham, topical songwriting was holy warfare. They founded Broadside in 1962 -- just in time for the civil-rights movement and the Vietnam War -- as a forum for explicit rage and lament in the spirit of Woody Guthrie's contention, quoted in the first issue, that "a good song can only do good."

For nearly three decades, Friesen and Cunningham published what they believed to be the best new songs of the day, taping many of them shoestring-style for a series of LPs that comprise the heart of The Best of Broadside. At five CDs, the box is heavy with stereotype: die-hard leftists marching in Guthrie's footsteps; young troubadours, mostly white and male, aping the acute irony and narrative cunning of Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs who, between them, wrote or sang fourteen of these eighty-nine songs.

But the Broadside regulars -- Pete Seeger, Tom Paxton, Eric Andersen and Malvina Reynolds among them -- were a stellar company, and there are hits in abundance here. Vital entries in the activist hymnal, like Ochs' stirring "Changes," Janis Ian's profoundly sad "Society's Child" and Bonnie Dobson's anti-nuke ballad "Morning Dew" (later a psych-blues showcase for the Grateful Dead), are featured in early versions by the writers. Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" is heard in its recorded debut, a '62 cover by the New World Singers. The black diva Nina Simone is gloriously pissed off in her live stomp through "Mississippi Goddam."

The solo-folkie aesthetic that dominates The Best of Broadside belies Friesen and Cunningham's broad definition of inspirational verse. In an early-1970s edition, Friesen cited Black Sabbath's "War Pigs" as one of the best new songs born of Vietnam. And Lucinda Williams' "Lafayette," published in Broadside in 1979 and cut by her for a 1980 Folkways LP, is a poignant carol of longing -- for home and fading innocence -- wrapped up in a sunny Cajun waltz. The Best of Broadside, a grand tribute to a stubborn ideal, is also, in its way, a profound reflection on loss. Heard next to the greed and plasticity of early-twenty-first-century pop, the conviction and selflessness in these songs sound like a long-dead language. We should be ashamed.

Everything about the Band always seemed ancient, as if they were born in sepia tones. But they were hungry modernists, a Canadian-American incarnation of Harry Smith's Anthology via rock & roll bars, the amphetamine velocity of road life with Dylan in '65-'66 and post-hippie sobriety. The Band's multi-instrumental gifts and three marvelous voices -- Rick Danko's lonesome warble, Richard Manuel's haunted falsetto, Levon Helm's flinty growl -- made a hearty futurist stew from the meat and aura of old Chess and Sun singles. And the only utopia open to the men and women in Robbie Robertson's frontier plays -- "The Weight," on 1968's Music From Big Pink; "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" and "King Harvest (Has Surely Come)," on 1969's The Band -- was the kind they could fight, dig and pray for with their own hands.

Finally reissued with a touch of class, Big Pink and The Band are two of rock's few perfect albums, immaculate reflections of their time (the retreat from acid and yippie street antics) and master fictions told with the spit and color of a fur trapper's memoirs. Neither record needs bonus tracks for improvement, but the fistful on each album are sweet gravy. They include alternate takes of "Whispering Pines" and "Jemima Surrender," both roughneck beauties, on The Band, and a Big Pink-era sketch of "Orange Juice Blues" with the late Manuel on vocal and piano, a bittersweet reminder of the big, gentle soul he brought to the Band.

Stage Fright and Cahoots, also remastered and fattened with outtakes, suffer mostly in comparison to their predecessors. Despite the perfect vocal terror Danko brings to the title song, 1970's Stage Fright is a party album, bright and loose-limbed, with only a late creeping shadow in "The Rumor." The musical and lyrical fatigue marring 1971's Cahoots is bearable, but the added demo of "Don't Do It" -- a funky butt-kicking of Marvin Gaye's "Baby Don't You Do It" -- beats nearly everything on the original LP.

David Johansen brings it all back home to Harry Smith, in repertoire and name -- a perfect example of the circular logic of American-folk geography. A former New York Doll, Johansen is an unlikely hobo-blues man, and his Harry Smiths -- guitarists Brian Koonin and Larry Saltzman, jazzers Kermit Driscoll on bass and Joey Baron on drums -- are sly groovers who seem, at first, to be overqualified for barn-dance work. Yet Johansen is a believable avatar of Smith's scholarship. Of the four songs Johansen covers from the '52 Anthology, he sings "Poor Boy Blues" like a fragment of Latin Mass; his chipped-granite yowl hangs with modal drama over bottleneck guitar and Baron's percussion sabotage. Johansen also fires up the right mix of wise and tired in "James Alley Blues": "I've done seen better days/But I'm puttin' up with these."

Smith would have approved of Johansen's own research -- the Lightnin' Hopkins covers; the murder ballad "Delia," sung by Johansen with exquisite languor. That Johansen sounds so in love and at home in tunes and tales nearly a century old is also testament to a central enduring lesson of Smith's Anthology: American music is an oral tradition, not a recorded one. If we stop singing, we will have nothing left but history. (RS 848)

DAVID FRICKE

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(Posted: Sep 14, 2000)