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Long before the marketing concept of 'Americana' was launched , this legendary set of tracks was issued on Folkways Records in 1952. All the material on it had been
recorded between 1927 and 1933. It had been compiled by Harry Smith (a man of no fixed
address , a polymath , beatnik and fabulist) from his personal collection of old 78s. The first song sets the occult tone , involving those staple ingredients of
many a folk-lyric , backwoods crime , a reluctant - and soon dead - lover and a talking bird. A song sometimes known as Lady Margaret , Young Hunting or Loving Henry ,
this version is Henry Lee , sung in 1929 by a man with the compelling name of Dick Justice. Hailing from Logan County , West Virginia , his repertoire (like that of
many of his contemporaries) was a mixture of Anglo-American ballads and African-American blues.
"Get down, get down, little Henry Lee, and stay all night with me.
The very best lodging I can afford will be fare better'n thee."
"I can't get down and I won't get down and stay all night with thee,
For the girl I have in that merry green land, I love far better'n thee."
She leaned herself against a fence, just for a kiss or two,
With a little pen-knife held in her hand, she plugged him through and through.
"Come all you ladies in the town, a secret for me keep,
With a diamond ring held on my hand I'll never will forsake."
"Some take him by his lily-white hand, some take him by his feet.
We'll throw him in this deep, deep well, more than one hundred feet.
Lie there, lie there, loving Henry Lee, till the flesh drops from your bones.
The girl you have in that merry green land still waits for your return."
"Fly down, fly down, you little bird, and alight on my right knee.
Your cage will be of purest gold, in deed of property."
"I can't fly down, or I won't fly down, and alight on your right knee.
A girl would murder her own true love would kill a little bird like me."
"If I had my bend and bow, my arrow and my string,
I'd pierce a dart so nigh your heart your wobble would be in vain."
"If you had your bend and bow, your arrow and your string,
I'd fly away to the merry green land and tell what I have seen."
By using old commercial recordings , the freewheeling Smith escaped the reverential pieties of many another 'heritage' folklorist. He selected musicians who hailed from the
(mainly southern) communities who bought their records. They were almost all men who were looking for release (if only briefly) from the mines , farms and factories in which
they laboured. This was an anthology of record-collector music whose ‘primitive’ sounds would be poured over and imitated by all the young hopefuls of the 50s and 60s American
folk revival. Harry Smith had been a seminal figure in the west coast avant-garde of the 1940s. He investigated the rituals , music and language of its remaining Native
Americans , painted murals , produced montage films , hunted out all manner of old records , whilst smoking dope and taking benzedrine. When he died in 1991 , he'd re-located
to the east coast , where he recorded the Beat poets and The Fugs (1). In the last year of his
life he said that he'd lived long enough to see the philosophy of the homeless and the impoverished alter the consciousness of America. Smith was in tune with the vernacular
spirit of his times in much the same way as Breugel the Elder was a painter of that spirit in sixteenth
century Flanders.
(1) Some of their songs included lyrics by William Blake or Mathew Arnold. They also wrote and sang the Swinburne Stomp and the timeless Rameses II is Dead , my Love.
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